Hello! I use AWStats to track my web site's visitors(through hoster's CPanel). As far as I know, awstats is not supposed to consider bots and other non-humans as unique visitors (in hosts list, but nevertheless, I found MSNbot IP in the list! Why? I probably just misunderstand it. Let's say, if we take May 2010... In summary I see that I have 76 unique visitors. Also I see that they don't count bots as visitors because where it says "Not viewed traffic" there're no any unique visitors. (* Not viewed traffic includes traffic generated by robots, worms, or replies with special HTTP status codes.) By the way, is it reasonable that I have 30 MB of viewed traffic and 2 MB of not viewed? Then I go down the list to "Hosts" . There I see this : "Hosts : 0 Known, 77 Unknown (unresolved ip) 76 Unique visitors" Then I click on "full list". And I see this IP: 207.46.195.213 and nslookup shows that its MSNBot. I also have 1 unresolved IP (what's that?)...In any case, MSNBot is resolved one (if I understand this correctly . The last and only IP in the list doesn't have any statistics near it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but a term "unresolved IP" has more to do with reverse DNS lookup and it's not relevant to my original inquiry (real people vs. non-humans). Of course, I can "deduct" my own IPs plus well known search bots from the list, but I don't know IPs of spam bots etc. So how I can find out from the list how many REAL PEOPLE actually visited my site? I realize that same person might have another IP so here I assume that every IP means a separate person. (In any case, even if the same person uses few different IPs, then usually they would be under the same subnet, so its easy to distinguish, say 23.12.10.20; 23.12.10.21 etc. or 23.13.40.17 if we take it "more extreme". My conclusion is that by using AWStats I won't know how many people visited my site. And the only way it could help me is to show the TENDENCY (upward or downward) of my site's visiting. Say, if I get in May 100 unique visitors and in June 200, then I'm doing fine. Again, here I assume that my site gets around the same ammount of non-humans every month (correct me if I'm wrong). Is there an APPROX. statistics of AWStats of its listed non-humans vs. human hosts?
Statistics of AWStats are merely an indication of what's going on on your site. The best way to analyse your stats is to download the raw log files from your site and read them or run them through one of many log file analyser programs available for download on the internet.
[QUOTE I also have 1 unresolved IP (what's that?)...[/QUOTE] When AWStats find an IP address in your log, it will tryto do a reverse DNS lookup to find the hostname and domain if the DNSLookup parameter, in your AWStats config file, is DNSLookup=1 (that by the way is the default value). The DNSLookup=0 willbe used only if your log file contains already resolved IP address. To avoid AWStats to lookup when it's already done (successfully or not) you can set DNSLookup=0 in AWStats config file. If you prefer, you can make the reverse DNS lookup on a log file before running your log analyzer (If you only need to convert a logfile with IP Addresses into a logfile with resolved hostnames). You can use for this logresolvemerge tool provided with AWStats distribution. Good luck!