> If I go to my own main url site (i.e the base index.html) will > AWStats count this as a Unique Visitor if the IP address changes from each > connection despite the fact that I visted the site myself ?
Probably - AWStats isn't using any kind of built-in cookie tracking so it has to be basically just estimating unique visitors by IP number and access time. > For such a visit does this unique visitor falls in the category "Direct > address / Bookmarks" from AWStats "Connect to site from" ? No, those will be related to the HTTP Referrer field in the logs - if the referring URL is empty then the user either typed it in or clicked on a bookmark, or they're paranoid types who turn that sort of thing off. If the referrer field contains a URL, then that's probably where the visitor came from (again, there are bugs in some older browsers that can make this a little inaccurate). > If so then does "Direct address / Bookmarks" means I'm the one visited > the site, i.e if most of the hits are from hosts that resolves to my ISP > domain name provider ? Depends - do you have a cron job that runs wget or similar? If so, that will massively increase the direct address stats because it will never supply a referrer. There is an option somewhere in AWStats to ignore this type of access (i.e. if you're running a Drupal site and a cron job is wgetting '/cron.php' every hour, you can set it to ignore hits on that URI. > If I connect to my site via ftp or SSH is this also logged as Unique > Visitor ? Does uploads and downloads counts as visits ? AWStats only analyses web server traffic, so ftp or ssh (or anything else) will not be counted. In terms of uploads and downloads, it doesn't matter. If it went through your web server it'll be in the report somewhere. > Cron scripts that accesses web pages not via browser but command line. > Does AWStats count stats for this as hits and logged them as Unique > Visitors for host that resolve to the domain name where the cron is > executed ? Yup. Doesn't really have to resolve either, it's just a distinct host in the log. Cheers, Julian. -- Julian Melville http://tiddly-pom.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
