If you have ever managed or edited a website, you will likely have experience tracking page views and hit statistics.
If this is the case, then this article is for you! Get ready to step into 2020 with a brand new interface!
A bit of history
There are multiple solutions on the market designed to help you analyse visits to your website.
Two methods exist to help you gather this information:
- Embed some code on your website to track your visits and send those results to a third party to render those results
- Keep control of your data: analyse your own raw logs to compute the relevant metrics
In 2004, in order to keep your data safe, we decided to use an on-premise solution called Urchin… but its time to change!
Why?
- Urchin was bought by Google and the software is discontinued. It hasn’t evolved, therefore, since 2012.
- Urchin is Flash Player based. Flash Player is discontinued and will be stopped in 2020 by Adobe. There will be no more support for it.
- It doesn’t offer the best possible experience.
- Urchin doesn’t allow users to visualize subdomain statistics. (example: app.mydomain.com)
How do we provide your website stats?
Every day, we compute statistics for several millions of websites. This is a specific requirement and few solutions exist to fill it.
What are those needs:
- Being able to compute the statistics of all the websites as fast as possible.
- Aggregate data to show anonymized data.
- Do not embed code/tracker on your site
- Have an easy to use interface aligned with today’s standards
- Give you the ability to see at the subdomain level your statistics
- Migrate your previous statistics from Urchin not to lose them
For a long time, we tried to avoid the “not invented here” effect because rebuilding a statistic tool is not our main job. So we tried a lot of solutions on the market. Open source or not. Free or with licence. And we did not find a solution able to scale our quantity of logs and compute statistics for all websites we host!
So, we decided to develop an alternative solution, and proposed it by default for everyone: OVHcloud Web Statistics (or OWStats)
So, what’s new?
A new user Interface to quickly visualise the most relevant statistics
You can find few sections:
- Dashboard: A summary of the activities on your domain with the dashboard
- Browsers: More technical information relating to the various browsers and platforms used to visit your domain
- Geolocalization: Which country/region visits your domain (the data is anonymized, so this is only a high level overview)
- Requests: Overview of the most viewed pages
- Robots: Analysis of the bots visiting your domain
- Status: Status code evolution and which pages are raising errors and should be investigated.
It would be simpler if we showed some pictures, wouldn’t it?
Well, of course it would! Here you have:
The dashboard:
Geolocalization page:
And the status pages:
Some numbers
Thanks to this new tool, we can compute your statistics up to 8x faster.
We also compute 2.5 TB of logs per day!
Want more infomation?
This post is an early preview of our incoming OVH Web Statistics service, we will come back to you with more posts about the technical details as the release date will approach!
