Comments on: Interesting (but disappointing) stats http://floatingsun.net/2006/02/12/interesting-but-disappointing-stats/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=interesting-but-disappointing-stats Sat, 11 May 2013 19:51:19 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: diwaker http://floatingsun.net/2006/02/12/interesting-but-disappointing-stats/#comment-293 diwaker Tue, 14 Feb 2006 07:53:40 +0000 http://floatingsun.net/blog/2006/02/12/544/#comment-293 Those things are ok, but have several limitations:

# You can only track HTML pages — no way of tracking non-HTML content like images, tar-balls, CSS files etc
# You can’t track the bandwidth consumed — this is important in a shared hosting environment
# You can’t track HTTP error codes. So lets say 30% of the hits you get result in a 404 (not found) error, you would want to know what resource is that and fix the problem. Similarly for 403 (access denied).
# You can’t easily track the different bots that might scrape your site.

Tools like awstats have a significant advantage in that they work directly with server logs. Script based tools such as statcounter can only use HTTP headers for their stats.

]]> By: nikhil http://floatingsun.net/2006/02/12/interesting-but-disappointing-stats/#comment-291 nikhil Mon, 13 Feb 2006 23:26:17 +0000 http://floatingsun.net/blog/2006/02/12/544/#comment-291 i have not tried the webstat softwares you are talking about, but used to use http://www.statcounter.com back at IIT to check on the visitors and still use it. Am pretty satisfied with it.

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