Best traffic tracking?

meady100 · 29 Mar 2010 at 11:06

Hi guys!

Just in need of a bit of advice and recommendation. Situation as follows: I'm a hosting reseller and one of my clients relies very heavily upon a Smartstats installation to monitor traffic for his business. The whole lot went down last week, losing the complete history. To say he was spitting feathers is an understatement. My hosting company didnt back it up (apparently because they couldnt do a restore on shared hosting) and are frankly indifferent, with me caught in the middle.

I now need to find a good, secure option for monitoring traffic. Will any third party offerings be up to the job? I'm looking for recommendations and general advice here. Swapping hosts is an option I would consider but would rather avoid.

Any advice very warmly received!

Steve

daz · 29 Mar 2010 at 12:32

Google Analytics is a very strong free option. Otherwise, there is Urchin (which Google bought an based Analytics on) or AWstats.

bigredshark · 29 Mar 2010 at 12:38

AWstats is very powerful certainly but Google Analytics is a client pleaser in terms of interface (less so in terms of install). Between those you can't go wrong really.

Of course AWstats needs access to the apache or IIS logs, which if you're on shared hosting may not be an option.

meady100 · 29 Mar 2010 at 14:09

Thank you both very much for these helpful replies. GA definitely sounds like the way to go and I will have a mess with it this afternoon.

Thanks again!!

Steve

Corasik · 30 Mar 2010 at 13:04

meady100 said:
My hosting company didnt back it up (apparently because they couldnt do a restore on shared hosting) and are frankly indifferent, with me caught in the middle.

No great surprise there, one of the biggest savings a hosting company can make (to keep prices to a bare minimum) is to forsake data backups, and only backup "basic configuration", and simply use a mirror or raid to avoid basic hardware faults.

3rd party tracking is a big of a problem, GA works to some degree, but it wont track anyone who has scripting disabled on their browser, and many Adblocker scripts (such as Firefox's Adblock and NoScript) can stop it working.

The best place to track traffic is the at the web server, processing the web servers log files.

I would have thought your best solution, would be to see if there was a way to phyiscally download the smartstats data, so you can keep a copy should your host have a similar issue in the future.

matthab · 1 Apr 2010 at 00:55

GA ive used it for years and it is very good.

bigredshark · 1 Apr 2010 at 08:43

Arguably the better solution is to move to a hosting provider which has enough common sense to back stuff up, this may involve paying more than you do currently but then again, providers do tend to be cheap for a reason...

daz · 1 Apr 2010 at 08:56

You'd be surprised by how poor some of the larger more expensive suppliers' backups are. (e.g. Rackspace CloudSites, supposed to be a premium managed shared hosting solution, no backups!)

The key thing is to ask before you buy, as price alone doesn't dictate whether a company has a decent backup schedule (and even backups of their backups).

bigredshark · 1 Apr 2010 at 09:04

daz said:
You'd be surprised by how poor some of the larger more expensive suppliers' backups are. (e.g. Rackspace CloudSites, supposed to be a premium managed shared hosting solution, no backups!)

The key thing is to ask before you buy, as price alone doesn't dictate whether a company has a decent backup schedule (and even backups of their backups).

I really wouldn't, I've worked for a number of those companies...

The line being 'backups are an add on service, we'd be happy to set them up for you, for a fee'

We use Netapp's and snapmirror to replicate all data relating to web hosting between sites for Linux, and DFS-R for Windows (that's as standard) , but the issue there is we spend £100k on storage and our competitors buy a couple of 1TB SATA drives and the prices reflect it.