Managing AWStats Web Analytics in cPanel

AWStats (Advanced Web Statistics) is a server-side analytics tool available in cPanel that generates detailed reports about your website traffic. Unlike JavaScript-based analytics tools, AWStats reads your server access logs directly, meaning it captures all requests — including bots and crawlers.

Accessing AWStats

Log in to cPanel.
Scroll to the Metrics section.
Click on AWStats.
Select the domain you want to view statistics for by clicking the View icon next to it.

A detailed statistics report will open in a new page.

Understanding AWStats Reports

AWStats provides a comprehensive breakdown of your traffic data:

Summary

Unique Visitors — individual IP addresses that accessed your site
Visits — total number of sessions (a visit ends after 60 minutes of inactivity)
Pages — number of page views (HTML, PHP, etc.)
Hits — total number of requests including images, scripts, and other resources
Bandwidth — total data transferred

Detailed Sections

Section	What It Shows
Monthly History	Traffic trends over the past 12 months
Days of Month	Daily traffic breakdown for the current month
Days of Week	Which days see the most traffic
Hours	Busiest hours of the day
Countries	Visitor locations by country
Hosts	Individual IP addresses and hostnames
Robots/Spiders	Search engine bots visiting your site
Referring Sites	External websites sending traffic to you
Search Keywords	Terms used to find your site via search engines
HTTP Status Codes	Breakdown of 200, 301, 404, and other response codes

Enabling or Updating AWStats

AWStats data is typically updated once per day by the server. However, you may notice options depending on your server configuration:

Automatic updates: Most servers process logs and update AWStats daily via a cron job.
Manual updates: Some cPanel configurations allow you to click an Update Now button when viewing your stats. If this option is not available, the data refreshes on the server’s schedule.

AWStats vs. Google Analytics

Feature	AWStats	Google Analytics
Data source	Server access logs	JavaScript tracking code
Bot tracking	Yes	No
Real-time data	No	Yes
Requires code changes	No	Yes
Blocked by ad blockers	No	Often

AWStats and tools like Google Analytics complement each other — AWStats provides a raw view of all server requests, while JavaScript-based tools offer richer user behavior insights.

Tips

Use AWStats to monitor bandwidth usage and identify traffic spikes.
Check the 404 errors section to find broken links on your site.
Review the Robots/Spiders section to ensure search engines are crawling your site.
If AWStats data seems outdated, wait for the next server log processing cycle or contact your hosting provider.