Obtaining Access Logs for User Web Sites?

David Hilbert asks: "I have a very amateurish home page for sharing family photos and unusually useful links with my friends and family, here. For a long time my son hosted my website on his computer. He added a visitor log to it. Even though my web site is rarely accessed, I still had great joy in looking over my visitor log daily to determine who was accessing my website. My son's situation, changed, however, and he could no longer host my website. I still wanted a web site, however, so had my ISP host it as they do for any member. However, my web site visitor log was gone. My ISP was either unwilling or unable to give me a log file of accesses to my site. I found a temporary alternative, however. I subscribed to a commercial service at the ToolShack to capture and do a fancy analysis of my site's visits (with colorful pie charts, bar graphs, etc). Several months, later, however, Toolshack quit working for me. I sent email to the techies at Toolshack. 'It's a mystery to me' is all I got from them, so I canceled my account. I would like some help finding an alternate web site logging service. I have had no luck thus far. I could do it myself but my ISP doesn't allow any scripts on user's web sites. Any ideas on how I could get a visitor log?"

Comments

Pay for Hosting Service

[TheDawgLives]

I use linuxwebhost.com They are only like $7-10 a month and they have all the fancy usage logs built in, plus they let you run just about any script you want.

Change Hosting services...

[mshiltonj]

Some hosting providers are lame. I recommend changing providers.

I host my site at pair.com. It's a cheap ftp-only site that costs only $5/mo. The provide raw logs, or will run analog on them. I've never had a single problem with them.

You can also get more robust accounts beyond ftp-only.

If you're willing to pay for tool shack, then consider switching providers and getting stats and logs for free.

Idea

[Vodak]

If you were willing to pay for the abilty to read logs then why don't you jump over to a web hosting comapny that includes logs in thier package deals? The ISP's webspace is never enough and most of the time they don't even allow you to run PHP scripts.

Try looking for counter or tracker software

[markwelch]

There are a bunch of services that will provide you with a counter or tracker, with varying report information available. Some will give you all the same data you'd see in a log file, others give you much less.

There is a list of these services, including paid and free counters and trackers, at http://www.adbility.com/show.asp?cat_id=346 (adbility.com) (select from the left-menu sub-options there).

old school image logging

[starfighter_org]

There's an old way of adding logging. but you need to be able to execute perl scripts. You place an image tag that points to the perl script "IMG SRC=whatever.com/cgi-bin/image.pl" the perl script delivers the image, and writes the address info to the log file. You can just use a 1x1 pixle white dot if you want. You can modify the perl script to report what you want, or even format just like apache so analog can process them and make your web page display of your visitors. These days, it's easier to just use a real web host who'll give you you own logs.