This post is the third in a series discussing the effective use of AWStats alongside Google Analytics. If you like what you read, consider subscribing to my full feed RSS.

There’s a few simple ways to discover if your web host has provided AWStats for you as part of your hosting package. In this post I’ll cover off each of them.

Ask

What features you get in your hosting package should be clearly explained on their web site or in the welcome email you would have received when you signed up. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s just not clear even with the big web hosts. If you can’t find a definitive answer then it’s worth sending an email to customer support asking for clarification.

Just so you know, here’s a list of analyser apps you will see. Some hosts offer ‘em all, but most offer one or two only:

• Analog – comprehensive but basic data presentation with long lists and basic bar charts. Not much recent development as its author is now the CTO of Clicktracks, a commercial alternative.
• AWStats – in my humble opinion, the best of all the freeware apps. The current version is 6.7, released in July 2007.
• ModLogAn – not much known about this one, except that it’s been abandoned and is no longer maintained. I’ve never used it.
• Webalizer – full featured and popular but tends to wildly overstate visitors numbers and page views. Like ModLogAn, it is no longer maintained.

Look

Grab your welcome email and follow the instructions to log in to your account control panel or admin panel. The look for an icon similar to one of these:

Click on the icon, and you should be taken to a list or table that tells you what’s available. For example, here’s the page I get for the Stratify web site:

AWStats is the second item on the list.

Check Files

The last way to check is a bit complex, so don’t bother with this one unless the others have failed to turn anything up. But for completeness’ sake I’ve included it.

The trick is to look at the directories you have installed on your web server. If you can find one called awstats (or files with awstats in the filename), you’re in luck. Again using the Stratify web site as an example, here’s what my web server directory structure looks like:

As you can see, my implementation of AWStats writes a new log file every month.

I Still Can’t Find AWStats – Now What?

As a final resort, you can get AWStats installed by a professional. I certainly don’t recommend you try it yourself, as there’s some configuration to do and you need root access to your web server (which most web hosts are reluctant to provide). The software itself is free, so you only need to pay someone to do it for you. Personally I’ve never needed to install it, as it’s been provided with every account I’ve ever set up.

The Next Post

In the next post of this series, I will be introducing you to the AWStats dashboard before describing the cintenst and usefulness of each of the data boxes. Look out for it in a day or so.

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