Showing posts with label web hosting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label web hosting. Show all posts
Friday, December 30, 2011
Unlimited and free hosting For webmasters//No restriction on uploading data
Thursday, June 02, 2011
Few Important Web Hosting Terminologies – Glossary
This web hosting glossary should help you while you shop around for a web hosting provider to host your website
- Add-On Domain A different website within your account that shares the resources of your hosting plan.
- Parked Domain A separate web domain pointing to your current account. People generally buy .com and .net versions. Either of them gives the same information.
- Dedicated IP An IP address that will be used by your website independently. A dedicated IP is a must for using SSL for accepting payment through your website.
- SSL An acronym for Secure Socket Layer, it is an encryption mainly used for eCommerce websites for secure payments through credit cards. When you use SSL in your site, you will find ‘https://’ in the address bar on the secure page.
- Bandwidth Amount of data transfer used on your account, whenever an email is received or sent, or when files are downloaded and uploaded.
- Disk Space Amount of space allocated on your web server for storing files, web pages, emails, etc.
- Uptime Amount of time your web server would be completely accessible and not interrupted by technical errors. It is calculated in terms of percentage. An uptime of 99% or more is considered ideal.
- .htaccess Determines permissions on what can be accessed by a particular file, by establishing certain parameters on them.
- FTP An acronym for File Transfer Protocol, it enables the uploading and downloading of files.
- SSH An acronym for Secure Shell that allows file transfer. Not many shared hosts allow this kind of file transfer.
- Control Panel The central hub for a web hosting account, whereby the user makes changes and controls different aspects of web hosting, like adding new domains & sub-domains, installing server applications and uploading web pages.
- MySQL A database system that can be found in many web hosting packages. It is frequently used for a number of web applications.
Monday, May 30, 2011
free domain ( .in and co.in)
Offer Till 31st August 2011
FREE DOMAIN Register for your business
HOSTING & WEBSITE FREE for ONE year
"FREE DOMAIN" "FREE HOSTING"
"FREE WEBSITE"
PREMIUM SERVICE FOR INDIAN BUSINESS
Get FREE .in or .co.in Domain (No personal Name)
Free 100 MB Hosting + 50 email id @7GB each
Free RV WEBSITE Builder with every hosting unlimited pages...
“SPECIAL OFFER : @ NO COST"
[b](all services are free for ONE year after that if you wish to renew your services then it will be @ 1750/- per/year.)
http://keepindiaonline.com/
---------------
FREE DOMAIN Register for your business
HOSTING & WEBSITE FREE for ONE year
"FREE DOMAIN" "FREE HOSTING"
"FREE WEBSITE"
PREMIUM SERVICE FOR INDIAN BUSINESS
Get FREE .in or .co.in Domain (No personal Name)
Free 100 MB Hosting + 50 email id @7GB each
Free RV WEBSITE Builder with every hosting unlimited pages...
“SPECIAL OFFER : @ NO COST"
[b](all services are free for ONE year after that if you wish to renew your services then it will be @ 1750/- per/year.)
http://keepindiaonline.com/
---------------
Sunday, May 01, 2011
top rated web hosting
A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their own website accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own or lease for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Web hosts can also provide data center space and connectivity to the Internet for servers they do not own to be located in their data center, called colocation or Housing as it is commonly called in Latin America or France.
The scope of hosting services varies widely. The most basic is web page and small-scale file hosting, where files
can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a Web interface. The files are usually delivered to the Web "as is" or with little processing. Many Internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free to their subscribers. People can also obtain Web page hosting from other, alternative service providers. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting often has a higher expense.
Single page hosting is generally sufficient only for personal web pages. A complex site calls for a more comprehensive package that provides database support and application development platforms (e.g. PHP, Java, Ruby on Rails, ColdFusion, and ASP.NET). These facilities allow the customers to write or install scripts for applications like forums and content management. For e-commerce, SSL is also highly recommended.
The host may also provide an interface or control panel for managing the Web server and installing scripts as well as other services like e-mail. Some hosts specialize in certain software or services (e.g. e-commerce). They are commonly used by larger companies to outsource network infrastructure to a hosting company.
The scope of hosting services varies widely. The most basic is web page and small-scale file hosting, where files
can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a Web interface. The files are usually delivered to the Web "as is" or with little processing. Many Internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free to their subscribers. People can also obtain Web page hosting from other, alternative service providers. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting often has a higher expense.
Single page hosting is generally sufficient only for personal web pages. A complex site calls for a more comprehensive package that provides database support and application development platforms (e.g. PHP, Java, Ruby on Rails, ColdFusion, and ASP.NET). These facilities allow the customers to write or install scripts for applications like forums and content management. For e-commerce, SSL is also highly recommended.
The host may also provide an interface or control panel for managing the Web server and installing scripts as well as other services like e-mail. Some hosts specialize in certain software or services (e.g. e-commerce). They are commonly used by larger companies to outsource network infrastructure to a hosting company.
webs web hosting
webs web hosting
Webs, formerly Freewebs, is a free website hosting service founded in 2001. The service allows users to build and manage their own "professional quality" sites. Users can use applications, normal pages, and many other features to enhance the quality of their website. Webs competes with other web hosting and creation sites such as Ning, Homestead, Yola (formerly Synthasite), Jimdo, Weebly, uCoz, and Wix.[
Hosted Service Provider
A Hosted Service Provider (xSP) is a business that delivers a combination of traditional IT functions such as infrastructure, applications (Software as a Service), security, monitoring, storage, Web development, website hosting and email, over the Internet or other wide area networks (WAN). An xSP combines the abilities of an application service provider (ASP) and an Internet service provider (ISP).
This approach enables customers to consolidate and outsource much of their IT needs for a predictable recurring fee. xSPs that integrate Web publishing give customers a central repository to rapidly and efficiently distribute information and resources among employees, customers, partners and the general public.
Hosted Service Providers benefit from economies of scale and operate on a one-to-many business model, delivering the same software and services to many customers at once. Customers are charged on a subscription basis.
Services Offered
As defined by analyst Ovum.
* Repeatable business process-led services shared among several clients
* Remotely delivered application services using shared resources
* Infrastructure services (both remotely managed and/or hosted services spanning data centre services, managed servers & databases, performance monitoring, security services, storage services and business continuity)
* Web hosting - the provision of infrastructure and application services to support the hosting of Web sites.
Web hosting service
A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their own website accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own or lease for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Web hosts can also provide data center space and connectivity to the Internet for servers they do not own to be located in their data center, called colocation or Housing as it is commonly called in Latin America or France.
The scope of hosting services varies widely. The most basic is web page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a Web interface. The files are usually delivered to the Web "as is" or with little processing. Many Internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free to their subscribers. People can also obtain Web page hosting from other, alternative service providers. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting often has a higher expense.
Single page hosting is generally sufficient only for personal web pages. A complex site calls for a more comprehensive package that provides database support and application development platforms (e.g. PHP, Java, Ruby on Rails, ColdFusion, and ASP.NET). These facilities allow the customers to write or install scripts for applications like forums and content management. For e-commerce, SSL is also highly recommended.
The host may also provide an interface or control panel for managing the Web server and installing scripts as well as other services like e-mail. Some hosts specialize in certain software or services (e.g. e-commerce). They are commonly used by larger companies to outsource network infrastructure to a hosting company.
Contents
* 1 Hosting reliability and uptime
* 2 Types of hosting
* 3 Obtaining hosting
* 4 See also
* 5 External links
Hosting reliability and uptime
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2009)
Multiple racks of servers.
Hosting uptime refers to the percentage of time the host is accessible via the internet. Many providers state that they aim for at least 99.9% uptime (roughly equivalent to 45 minutes of downtime a month, or less), but there may be server restarts and planned (or unplanned) maintenance in any hosting environment and this may or may not be considered part of the official uptime promise.
Many providers tie uptime and accessibility into their own service level agreement (SLA). SLAs sometimes include refunds or reduced costs if performance goals are not met.
Types of hosting
A typical server "rack," commonly seen in colocation centres.
Internet hosting services can run Web servers; see Internet hosting services.
Many large companies who are not internet service providers also need a computer permanently connected to the web so they can send email, files, etc. to other sites. They may also use the computer as a website host so they can provide details of their goods and services to anyone interested. Additionally these people may decide to place online orders.
* Free web hosting service: offered by different companies with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
* Shared web hosting service: one's website is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few to hundreds or thousands. Typically, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features available with this type of service can be quite extensive. A shared website may be hosted with a reseller.
* Reseller web hosting: allows clients to become web hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may vary tremendously in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a collocated server. Many resellers provide a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and provide the technical support themselves.
* Virtual Dedicated Server: also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be allocated in a way that does not directly reflect the underlying hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however virtualisation may be done for a number of reasons, including the ability to move a VPS container between servers. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are sometimes responsible for patching and maintaining the server.
* Dedicated hosting service: the user gets his or her own Web server and gains full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user typically does not own the server. Another type of Dedicated hosting is Self-Managed or Unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for Dedicated plans. The user has full administrative access to the box, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of his own dedicated box.
* Managed hosting service: the user gets his or her own Web server but is not allowed full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The user is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee quality of service by not allowing the user to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems. The user typically does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.
* Colocation web hosting service: similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colo server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the most powerful and expensive type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their client's machine, providing only the electrical, Internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colo, the client would have his own administrator visit the data center on site to do any hardware upgrades or changes.
* Cloud Hosting: is a new type of hosting platform that allows customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. Removing single-point of failures and allowing customers to pay for only what they use versus what they could use.
* Clustered hosting: having multiple servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered Servers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Usually Web hosts use Clustered Hosting for their Shared hosting plans, as there are multiple benefits to the mass managing of clients)
* Grid hosting: this form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
* Home server: usually a single machine placed in a private residence can be used to host one or more web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively attempt to block home servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A common way to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by creating an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically change the IP address that a URL points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types of hosting provided by web host service providers:
* File hosting service: hosts files, not web pages
* Image hosting service
* Video hosting service
* Blog hosting service
* One-click hosting
* Pastebin Hosts text snippets
* Shopping cart software
* E-mail hosting service
Obtaining hosting
Web hosting is often provided as part of a general Internet access plan; there are many free and paid providers offering these
A customer needs to evaluate the requirements of the application to choose what kind of hosting to use. Such considerations include database server software, scripting software, and operating system. Most hosting providers provide Linux-based web hosting which offers a wide range of different software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The web hosting client may want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multi-media services for streaming media. A customer may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from PHP, Perl, and Python but may also use ASP .Net or Classic ASP. Web hosting packages often include a Web Content Management System, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical aspects.
The scope of hosting services varies widely. The most basic is web page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a Web interface. The files are usually delivered to the Web "as is" or with little processing. Many Internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free to their subscribers. People can also obtain Web page hosting from other, alternative service providers. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or inexpensive. Business web site hosting often has a higher expense.
Single page hosting is generally sufficient only for personal web pages. A complex site calls for a more comprehensive package that provides database support and application development platforms (e.g. PHP, Java, Ruby on Rails, ColdFusion, and ASP.NET). These facilities allow the customers to write or install scripts for applications like forums and content management. For e-commerce, SSL is also highly recommended.
The host may also provide an interface or control panel for managing the Web server and installing scripts as well as other services like e-mail. Some hosts specialize in certain software or services (e.g. e-commerce). They are commonly used by larger companies to outsource network infrastructure to a hosting company.
Contents
* 1 Hosting reliability and uptime
* 2 Types of hosting
* 3 Obtaining hosting
* 4 See also
* 5 External links
Hosting reliability and uptime
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2009)
Multiple racks of servers.
Hosting uptime refers to the percentage of time the host is accessible via the internet. Many providers state that they aim for at least 99.9% uptime (roughly equivalent to 45 minutes of downtime a month, or less), but there may be server restarts and planned (or unplanned) maintenance in any hosting environment and this may or may not be considered part of the official uptime promise.
Many providers tie uptime and accessibility into their own service level agreement (SLA). SLAs sometimes include refunds or reduced costs if performance goals are not met.
Types of hosting
A typical server "rack," commonly seen in colocation centres.
Internet hosting services can run Web servers; see Internet hosting services.
Many large companies who are not internet service providers also need a computer permanently connected to the web so they can send email, files, etc. to other sites. They may also use the computer as a website host so they can provide details of their goods and services to anyone interested. Additionally these people may decide to place online orders.
* Free web hosting service: offered by different companies with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
* Shared web hosting service: one's website is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few to hundreds or thousands. Typically, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features available with this type of service can be quite extensive. A shared website may be hosted with a reseller.
* Reseller web hosting: allows clients to become web hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers' accounts may vary tremendously in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a collocated server. Many resellers provide a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and provide the technical support themselves.
* Virtual Dedicated Server: also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be allocated in a way that does not directly reflect the underlying hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however virtualisation may be done for a number of reasons, including the ability to move a VPS container between servers. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are sometimes responsible for patching and maintaining the server.
* Dedicated hosting service: the user gets his or her own Web server and gains full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user typically does not own the server. Another type of Dedicated hosting is Self-Managed or Unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for Dedicated plans. The user has full administrative access to the box, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of his own dedicated box.
* Managed hosting service: the user gets his or her own Web server but is not allowed full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The user is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee quality of service by not allowing the user to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems. The user typically does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.
* Colocation web hosting service: similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colo server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the most powerful and expensive type of web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their client's machine, providing only the electrical, Internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colo, the client would have his own administrator visit the data center on site to do any hardware upgrades or changes.
* Cloud Hosting: is a new type of hosting platform that allows customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. Removing single-point of failures and allowing customers to pay for only what they use versus what they could use.
* Clustered hosting: having multiple servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered Servers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability. (Usually Web hosts use Clustered Hosting for their Shared hosting plans, as there are multiple benefits to the mass managing of clients)
* Grid hosting: this form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
* Home server: usually a single machine placed in a private residence can be used to host one or more web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively attempt to block home servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A common way to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by creating an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically change the IP address that a URL points to when the IP address changes.
Some specific types of hosting provided by web host service providers:
* File hosting service: hosts files, not web pages
* Image hosting service
* Video hosting service
* Blog hosting service
* One-click hosting
* Pastebin Hosts text snippets
* Shopping cart software
* E-mail hosting service
Obtaining hosting
Web hosting is often provided as part of a general Internet access plan; there are many free and paid providers offering these
A customer needs to evaluate the requirements of the application to choose what kind of hosting to use. Such considerations include database server software, scripting software, and operating system. Most hosting providers provide Linux-based web hosting which offers a wide range of different software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The web hosting client may want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multi-media services for streaming media. A customer may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from PHP, Perl, and Python but may also use ASP .Net or Classic ASP. Web hosting packages often include a Web Content Management System, so the end-user does not have to worry about the more technical aspects.
Hosting Controller
Hosting Controller or Hosting Controller Automation Solution is a commercial automation hosting program created by Advanced Communications of Los Angeles, California USA. Development of the program began in 1997.
Contents
* 1 Overview
* 2 Latest release
* 3 HC Enterprise Modules
* 4 Support for other applications
* 5 Competing software
* 6 References
Overview
Hosting Controller Automation Solution is a business and operational support system for hosting service providers, including shared web hosting for both Linux and Windows. It also supports SaaS and Enterprise hosting services like MS Exchange, HMC (versions 4.0 and 4.5), SharePoint and BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
Latest release
HC8, released in March 2009, manages different hosting services in both cluster and simple environments.[1][2] It provides support for web hosting companies to manage Windows and Linux servers through a unified interface. The major difference in HC8 is the addition of enterprise modules by which Hosting Service Providers (HSPs) can manage and automate enterprise hosting services such as those listed above.[3]
HC Enterprise Modules
HC Enterprise Modules provide interface with programs such as Microsoft Exchange 2007.[4] The modules currently available for live production are:
- Microsoft Exchange 2007
- MS HMC 4.0/ HMC 4.5 - BlackBerry Enterprise Server
- SharePoint services
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Support for other applications
Hosting Controller is working to support more enterprise solutions via the addition of modules by the end of 2009. Planned modules include:
- Support for Hyper-V
- Support for OCS
- Modified and improved version of HMC 4.0/4.5
Competing software
* Plesk
* MachPanel
* HELM
* cPanel
* Baifox
* DirectAdmin
* ispCP
* ISPConfig
* Kloxo
* SysCP
* Webmin
Contents
* 1 Overview
* 2 Latest release
* 3 HC Enterprise Modules
* 4 Support for other applications
* 5 Competing software
* 6 References
Overview
Hosting Controller Automation Solution is a business and operational support system for hosting service providers, including shared web hosting for both Linux and Windows. It also supports SaaS and Enterprise hosting services like MS Exchange, HMC (versions 4.0 and 4.5), SharePoint and BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
Latest release
HC8, released in March 2009, manages different hosting services in both cluster and simple environments.[1][2] It provides support for web hosting companies to manage Windows and Linux servers through a unified interface. The major difference in HC8 is the addition of enterprise modules by which Hosting Service Providers (HSPs) can manage and automate enterprise hosting services such as those listed above.[3]
HC Enterprise Modules
HC Enterprise Modules provide interface with programs such as Microsoft Exchange 2007.[4] The modules currently available for live production are:
- Microsoft Exchange 2007
- MS HMC 4.0/ HMC 4.5 - BlackBerry Enterprise Server
- SharePoint services
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Support for other applications
Hosting Controller is working to support more enterprise solutions via the addition of modules by the end of 2009. Planned modules include:
- Support for Hyper-V
- Support for OCS
- Modified and improved version of HMC 4.0/4.5
Competing software
* Plesk
* MachPanel
* HELM
* cPanel
* Baifox
* DirectAdmin
* ispCP
* ISPConfig
* Kloxo
* SysCP
* Webmin
FREE DOMAIN NAME AND HOSTING Apply today for your free .COM .NET or .ORG domain name, we will even host it on powerful cPanelX servers with full PHP and MySQL features. Apply today for your free .COM .NET or .ORG domain name, we will host your free domain name on powerful cPanelX servers with full PHP and MySQL features:
FREE DOMAIN NAME AND HOSTING Apply today for your free .COM .NET or .ORG domain name, we will even host it on powerful cPanelX servers with full PHP and MySQL features. Apply today for your free .COM .NET or .ORG domain name, we will host your free domain name on powerful cPanelX servers with full PHP and MySQL features:
Webs (web hosting)
Webs, formerly Freewebs, is a free website hosting service founded in 2001. The service allows users to build and manage their own "professional quality" sites. Users can use applications, normal pages, and many other features to enhance the quality of their website. Webs competes with other web hosting and creation sites such as Ning, Homestead, Yola (formerly Synthasite), Jimdo, Weebly, uCoz, and Wix.[2]
Contents
* 1 History
* 2 Usage
* 3 Pricing
* 4 Awards and honors
* 5 File Manager
* 6 Video Import Options
* 7 References
* 8 See also
* 9 External links
History
Wiki letter w cropped.svg This section requires expansion.
Webs began in 2001 as Freewebs just after the dot-com bubble. It was a start-up launched by brothers Haroon and Zeki Mokhtarzada after their last year at the University of Maryland, College Park.[3][4] Their goal was to make the Internet accessible to anyone and to protect user's rights to free speech.[5] As of April 2007, the site recorded 18 million unique visitors a month.[4] Webs sites can include blogs, forums, wikis, calendars, guestbooks, webstore, photo gallery, links, web forms, widgets, games, puzzles, videos, and designer templates. The site includes paid features such as removal of on-site advertisements as well as the inclusion of other features.
Usage
On November 14, 2008, Freewebs changed its name to Webs, but users' URLs remained in the freewebs.com domain unless they chose to change over. Years after the name change from Freewebs to Webs, new users automatically have the domain webs.com. The domainname.webs.com is the domain for every site unless the user chooses to pay money and buy their own domain for use on Webs. Webs offers two types of web hosting, one for experienced website makers and one for first time / less experienced site builders. Less experienced users can choose from a variety of "widgets" and premade site layouts. More experienced users can choose the HTML way and avoid Webs' ads that come with premade layouts which will, in turn, appear at the bottom rather than in the middle. It is important to note that once a user has signed up for/switched over to an HTML account, he/she cannot revert to the 'site builder' web hosting option.
Webs only offers FTP access to paying subscribers who do not use the site builder.
Pricing
Hosting is free upon signing up, but the free version has limited features and requires that banner ads be placed on websites. There are three other payment options, or "upgrades": Starter, Enhanced, and Pro. The more expensive the upgrade, the more storage space, bandwidth,additional email addresses, and web forms are allowed.
Awards and honors
In 2010, Webs was recognized as one of the Hottest Washington DC Companies by Lead411[6] and received “Easy Website Builder – Best Web Tool” award from WebHostingSearch.com.[7]
File Manager
The Webs File Manager is designed so one can store webpages which are hidden when one opens the file manager and other files for a user's site like a sitemap, photos, videos, music, software, games, etc. For the first 7 days that a user's website exists the user will be on provisional mode where he/she can't upload certain types of files to the file manager such as .exe, .msi (software), .zip, or .rar (WinZip files). But after those 7 days one will be able to upload those file types to the file manager for one's Webs.com website. Once a user has reached their web storage limit, their only way to gain more is to use money or credits to buy it.
Video Import Options
There are several ways to embed or import a video onto a Webs.com website. One can type in or paste a video URL, paste an embedded code, search on YouTube, insert a flash video, or upload a video from a computer
Contents
* 1 History
* 2 Usage
* 3 Pricing
* 4 Awards and honors
* 5 File Manager
* 6 Video Import Options
* 7 References
* 8 See also
* 9 External links
History
Wiki letter w cropped.svg This section requires expansion.
Webs began in 2001 as Freewebs just after the dot-com bubble. It was a start-up launched by brothers Haroon and Zeki Mokhtarzada after their last year at the University of Maryland, College Park.[3][4] Their goal was to make the Internet accessible to anyone and to protect user's rights to free speech.[5] As of April 2007, the site recorded 18 million unique visitors a month.[4] Webs sites can include blogs, forums, wikis, calendars, guestbooks, webstore, photo gallery, links, web forms, widgets, games, puzzles, videos, and designer templates. The site includes paid features such as removal of on-site advertisements as well as the inclusion of other features.
Usage
On November 14, 2008, Freewebs changed its name to Webs, but users' URLs remained in the freewebs.com domain unless they chose to change over. Years after the name change from Freewebs to Webs, new users automatically have the domain webs.com. The domainname.webs.com is the domain for every site unless the user chooses to pay money and buy their own domain for use on Webs. Webs offers two types of web hosting, one for experienced website makers and one for first time / less experienced site builders. Less experienced users can choose from a variety of "widgets" and premade site layouts. More experienced users can choose the HTML way and avoid Webs' ads that come with premade layouts which will, in turn, appear at the bottom rather than in the middle. It is important to note that once a user has signed up for/switched over to an HTML account, he/she cannot revert to the 'site builder' web hosting option.
Webs only offers FTP access to paying subscribers who do not use the site builder.
Pricing
Hosting is free upon signing up, but the free version has limited features and requires that banner ads be placed on websites. There are three other payment options, or "upgrades": Starter, Enhanced, and Pro. The more expensive the upgrade, the more storage space, bandwidth,additional email addresses, and web forms are allowed.
Awards and honors
In 2010, Webs was recognized as one of the Hottest Washington DC Companies by Lead411[6] and received “Easy Website Builder – Best Web Tool” award from WebHostingSearch.com.[7]
File Manager
The Webs File Manager is designed so one can store webpages which are hidden when one opens the file manager and other files for a user's site like a sitemap, photos, videos, music, software, games, etc. For the first 7 days that a user's website exists the user will be on provisional mode where he/she can't upload certain types of files to the file manager such as .exe, .msi (software), .zip, or .rar (WinZip files). But after those 7 days one will be able to upload those file types to the file manager for one's Webs.com website. Once a user has reached their web storage limit, their only way to gain more is to use money or credits to buy it.
Video Import Options
There are several ways to embed or import a video onto a Webs.com website. One can type in or paste a video URL, paste an embedded code, search on YouTube, insert a flash video, or upload a video from a computer
Free web hosting service
A free web hosting service is a web hosting service that is free, usually advertisement-supported. Free web hosts will usually provide a subdomain (yoursite.example.com) or a directory (www.example.com/~yourname). In contrast, paid web hosts will usually provide a second-level domain along with the hosting (www.yourname.com). Many free hosts do allow use of separately-purchased domains. Rarely, a free host may also operate as a domain name registrar.
File hosting on free webhosts
Many free web hosting services discourage the use of their free web hosting services for file or image hosting only in which no web page is established or setup resulting in the use of bandwidth due to hot linking of files with no revenue gain to the service provider in the case of advertising supported services. As a result, hot linking or remote linking or inclusion of many image, media and download file formats is disabled or not permitted on many free web hosting services.
Other common limitations on file hosting limits on free hosts are limits on file size, for example no files over 5 MB or file types such as programs or large media files such as MP3.
This has resulted in the growth of free hosting services dedicated to image hosting, video hosting and general file hosting which permit remote hotlinking of files and larger file formats.
Co-branding and resellers
These let you brand fixed plans with your own company. Other services, offer WHM or panel reselling. This allows the client to develop his or her own web hosting plans and business.
Some customization commonly afforded to the co-branding or reseller owner would be the ability to set service quotas, to add, enable, disable or remove features of resold accounts, custom reseller or co-branded website, private label DNS and backend services among other items to differentiate the individual's service from the parent company of which they are a reseller or co-branded provider.
The key difference between co-branded and reseller services is the level of customization afforded to the individual setting up their own free hosting service and the level of autonomy afforded to the individual service owner.
File hosting on free webhosts
Many free web hosting services discourage the use of their free web hosting services for file or image hosting only in which no web page is established or setup resulting in the use of bandwidth due to hot linking of files with no revenue gain to the service provider in the case of advertising supported services. As a result, hot linking or remote linking or inclusion of many image, media and download file formats is disabled or not permitted on many free web hosting services.
Other common limitations on file hosting limits on free hosts are limits on file size, for example no files over 5 MB or file types such as programs or large media files such as MP3.
This has resulted in the growth of free hosting services dedicated to image hosting, video hosting and general file hosting which permit remote hotlinking of files and larger file formats.
Co-branding and resellers
These let you brand fixed plans with your own company. Other services, offer WHM or panel reselling. This allows the client to develop his or her own web hosting plans and business.
Some customization commonly afforded to the co-branding or reseller owner would be the ability to set service quotas, to add, enable, disable or remove features of resold accounts, custom reseller or co-branded website, private label DNS and backend services among other items to differentiate the individual's service from the parent company of which they are a reseller or co-branded provider.
The key difference between co-branded and reseller services is the level of customization afforded to the individual setting up their own free hosting service and the level of autonomy afforded to the individual service owner.
Web hosting control panel
A control panel, in web hosting, is a web-based interface provided by the hosting company that allows customers to manage their various hosted services in a single place.
Some of the commonly available modules in most control panels:
* Access to server logs.
* Details of available and used webspace and bandwidth.
* Email account configuration.
* Maintaining FTP users’ accounts.
* Managing database.
* Visitor statistics using web log analysis software.
* Web-based file manager.
Some of the commonly available modules in most control panels:
* Access to server logs.
* Details of available and used webspace and bandwidth.
* Email account configuration.
* Maintaining FTP users’ accounts.
* Managing database.
* Visitor statistics using web log analysis software.
* Web-based file manager.
Reseller web hosting
Reseller hosting is a form of web hosting wherein the account owner has the ability to use his/her allotted hard drive space and bandwidth to host websites on behalf of third parties. The reseller purchases the host's services wholesale and then sells them to customers, possibly for a profit. A certain portion of hard drive and bandwidth is allocated to the reseller account. The reseller may rent a dedicated server from a hosting company, or resell shared hosting services. In the latter case, the reseller is simply given the permission to sell a certain amount of disk space and bandwidth to his own customers without renting a server from a web hosting company he signed for a reseller account with.
The typical web hosting reseller might be a web design firm, web developer or systems integrator who offers web hosting as an add-on service. Reseller hosting is also an inexpensive way for web hosting entrepreneurs to start a company. Most reseller hosting plans allow resellers to create their own service plans and choose their own pricing structure. In many cases, resellers are able to establish their own branding via customized control panels and name servers.
Reseller hosting does not require extensive knowledge of the technical aspects of web hosting. Usually, the data center operator is responsible for maintaining network infrastructure and hardware, and the dedicated server owner configures, secures, and updates the server. A reseller is responsible for interfacing with his/her own customer base, but any hardware, software and connectivity problems are typically forwarded to the server provider from whom the reseller plan was purchased. Being a profitable reseller firm usually involves extensive advertising to get customers. While the monthly fees with major hosts are only a few dollars a month, it's a low margin business, and resellers must devote large advertising budgets to compete with established competitors. However, web hosting is one of the biggest online businesses, because every website needs hosting.
Resellers can set up and manage customer accounts via a web interface, usually point and click "Control Panels."
Well-known Control Panels List:
* WHM/cPanel (Unix)(Windows version coming soon)
* Plesk (Windows/Unix)
* DirectAdmin
* Webmin (Unix)
* H-sphere (H-sphere)
The typical web hosting reseller might be a web design firm, web developer or systems integrator who offers web hosting as an add-on service. Reseller hosting is also an inexpensive way for web hosting entrepreneurs to start a company. Most reseller hosting plans allow resellers to create their own service plans and choose their own pricing structure. In many cases, resellers are able to establish their own branding via customized control panels and name servers.
Reseller hosting does not require extensive knowledge of the technical aspects of web hosting. Usually, the data center operator is responsible for maintaining network infrastructure and hardware, and the dedicated server owner configures, secures, and updates the server. A reseller is responsible for interfacing with his/her own customer base, but any hardware, software and connectivity problems are typically forwarded to the server provider from whom the reseller plan was purchased. Being a profitable reseller firm usually involves extensive advertising to get customers. While the monthly fees with major hosts are only a few dollars a month, it's a low margin business, and resellers must devote large advertising budgets to compete with established competitors. However, web hosting is one of the biggest online businesses, because every website needs hosting.
Resellers can set up and manage customer accounts via a web interface, usually point and click "Control Panels."
Well-known Control Panels List:
* WHM/cPanel (Unix)(Windows version coming soon)
* Plesk (Windows/Unix)
* DirectAdmin
* Webmin (Unix)
* H-sphere (H-sphere)
Web Hosting Magazine
Web Hosting Magazine was a web hosting industry print magazine that published from 2000 to 2002. It spawned a companion tradeshow, Web Hosting Expo. Its founders and editors were Dmitri Eroshenko and Isabel Wang, and it was published by Infotonics Media. The magazine was written and edited with a deliberately "edgy" style, designed to
appeal to the primarily young and male constituency of the ISP industry.[citation needed] Contributors included Gina Larson, Steve Schultz, Jeffrey Carl, and Eric Trager.
Stub icon This trade magazine-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.v · d · e
In 2003, Ping! Zine Web Hosting Magazine was launched, based on the concept of Web Hosting Magazine and Isabel Wang came on board as a main part of the Editorial Board. This magazine continued with the edgy style.
Also in 2003 Web Host Industry Review Magazine (WHIR Magazine) was born out of the need for a more serious hard hitting news and trade publication in the Web Hosting Industry.
appeal to the primarily young and male constituency of the ISP industry.[citation needed] Contributors included Gina Larson, Steve Schultz, Jeffrey Carl, and Eric Trager.
Stub icon This trade magazine-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.v · d · e
In 2003, Ping! Zine Web Hosting Magazine was launched, based on the concept of Web Hosting Magazine and Isabel Wang came on board as a main part of the Editorial Board. This magazine continued with the edgy style.
Also in 2003 Web Host Industry Review Magazine (WHIR Magazine) was born out of the need for a more serious hard hitting news and trade publication in the Web Hosting Industry.
Web analytics
Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.[1]
Web analytics is not just a tool for measuring website traffic but can be used as a tool for business research and market research. Web analytics applications can also help companies measure the results of traditional print advertising campaigns. It helps one to estimate how the traffic to the website changed after the launch of a new advertising campaign. Web analytics provides data on the number of visitors, page views, etc. to gauge the traffic and popularity trends which helps doing the market research.
There are two categories
of web analytics; off-site and on-site web analytics.
Off-site web analytics refers to web measurement and analysis regardless of whether you own or maintain a website. It includes the measurement of a website's potential audience (opportunity), share of voice (visibility), and buzz (comments) that is happening on the Internet as a whole.
On-site web analytics measure a visitor's journey once on your website. This includes its drivers and conversions; for example, which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase. On-site web analytics measures the performance of your website in a commercial context. This data is typically compared against key performance indicators for performance, and used to improve a web site or marketing campaign's audience response.
Historically, web analytics has referred to on-site visitor measurement. However in recent years this has blurred, mainly because vendors are producing tools that span both categories.
The remainder of this article concerns on-site web analytics.
Contents
* 1 On-site web analytics technologies
o 1.1 Web server logfile analysis
o 1.2 Page tagging
o 1.3 Logfile analysis vs page tagging
+ 1.3.1 Advantages of logfile analysis
+ 1.3.2 Advantages of page tagging
+ 1.3.3 Economic factors
o 1.4 Hybrid methods
o 1.5 Visitors Geolocation
o 1.6 Click analytics
o 1.7 Customer lifecycle analytics
o 1.8 Other methods
* 2 Key definitions
* 3 Common sources of confusion in web analytics
o 3.1 The hotel problem
o 3.2 New visitors + Repeat visitors unequal to total visitors
* 4 Web analytics methods
o 4.1 Problems with cookies
o 4.2 Unique landing pages vs referrals for campaign tracking
* 5 Secure analytics (metering) methods
* 6 See also
* 7 References
* 8 Bibliography
* 9 External links
On-site web analytics technologies
Many different vendors provide on-site web analytics software and services. There are two main technological approaches to collecting the data. The first method, logfile analysis, reads the logfiles in which the web server records all its transactions. The second method, page tagging, uses JavaScript on each page to notify a third-party server when a page is rendered by a web browser. Both collect data that can be processed to produce web traffic reports.
In addition other data sources may also be added to augment the data. For example; e-mail response rates, direct mail campaign data, sales and lead information, user performance data such as click heat mapping, or other custom metrics as needed.
Web server logfile analysis
Web servers record some of their transactions in a logfile. It was soon realized that these logfiles could be read by a program to provide data on the popularity of the website. Thus arose web log analysis software.
In the early 1990s, web site statistics consisted primarily of counting the number of client requests (or hits) made to the web server. This was a reasonable method initially, since each web site often consisted of a single HTML file. However, with the introduction of images in HTML, and web sites that spanned multiple HTML files, this count became less useful. The first true commercial Log Analyzer was released by IPRO in 1994 [2].
Two units of measure were introduced in the mid 1990s to gauge more accurately the amount of human activity on web servers. These were page views and visits (or sessions). A page view was defined as a request made to the web server for a page, as opposed to a graphic, while a visit was defined as a sequence of requests from a uniquely identified client that expired after a certain amount of inactivity, usually 30 minutes. The page views and visits are still commonly displayed metrics, but are now considered rather rudimentary.
The emergence of search engine spiders and robots in the late 1990s, along with web proxies and dynamically assigned IP addresses for large companies and ISPs, made it more difficult to identify unique human visitors to a website. Log analyzers responded by tracking visits by cookies, and by ignoring requests from known spiders.
The extensive use of web caches also presented a problem for logfile analysis. If a person revisits a page, the second request will often be retrieved from the browser's cache, and so no request will be received by the web server. This means that the person's path through the site is lost. Caching can be defeated by configuring the web server, but this can result in degraded performance for the visitor to the website.
Page tagging
Concerns about the accuracy of logfile analysis in the presence of caching, and the desire to be able to perform web analytics as an outsourced service, led to the second data collection method, page tagging or 'Web bugs'.
In the mid 1990s, Web counters were commonly seen — these were images included in a web page that showed the number of times the image had been requested, which was an estimate of the number of visits to that page. In the late 1990s this concept evolved to include a small invisible image instead of a visible one, and, by using JavaScript, to pass along with the image request certain information about the page and the visitor. This information can then be processed remotely by a web analytics company, and extensive statistics generated.
The web analytics service also manages the process of assigning a cookie to the user, which can uniquely identify them during their visit and in subsequent visits. Cookie acceptance rates vary significantly between web sites and may affect the quality of data collected and reported.
Collecting web site data using a third-party data collection server (or even an in-house data collection server) requires an additional DNS look-up by the user's computer to determine the IP address of the collection server. On occasion, delays in completing a successful or failed DNS look-ups may result in data not being collected.
With the increasing popularity of Ajax-based solutions, an alternative to the use of an invisible image, is to implement a call back to the server from the rendered page. In this case, when the page is rendered on the web browser, a piece of Ajax code would call back to the server and pass information about the client that can then be aggregated by a web analytics company. This is in some ways flawed by browser restrictions on the servers which can be contacted with XmlHttpRequest objects.
Logfile analysis vs page tagging
Both logfile analysis programs and page tagging solutions are readily available to companies that wish to perform web analytics. In some cases, the same web analytics company will offer both approaches. The question then arises of which method a company should choose. There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach[3].
Advantages of logfile analysis
The main advantages of logfile analysis over page tagging are as follows:
* The web server normally already produces logfiles, so the raw data is already available. To collect data via page tagging requires changes to the website.
* The data is on the company's own servers, and is in a standard, rather than a proprietary, format. This makes it easy for a company to switch programs later, use several different programs, and analyze historical data with a new program.
* Page tagging solutions can involve vendor lock-in, but this problem can be avoided by using some type of include to embed the tracking code on each page from one file. It can then easily be changed for all pages simply by changing it in this one file, thus making it possible to easily add and remove analytics platforms without changing each page individually.
* Logfiles contain information on visits from search engine spiders. Although these should not be reported as part of the human activity, it is useful information for search engine optimization.
* Logfiles require no additional DNS Lookups. Thus there are no external server calls which can slow page load speeds, or result in uncounted page views.
* The web server reliably records every transaction it makes. Page tagging may not be able to record all transactions. Reasons include:
o Page tagging relies on the visitors' browsers co-operating, which a certain proportion may not do (for example, if JavaScript is disabled, or a hosts file prohibits requests to certain servers).
o Tags may be omitted from pages either by oversight or between bouts of additional page tagging.
o It may not be possible to include tags in all pages. Examples include static content such as PDFs or application-generated dynamic pages where re-engineering the application to include tags is not an option.
Advantages of page tagging
The main advantages of page tagging over logfile analysis are as follows.
* Counting is activated by opening the page, not requesting it from the server. If a page is cached, it will not be counted by the server. Cached pages can account for up to one-third of all pageviews. Not counting cached pages seriously skews many site metrics. It is for this reason server-based log analysis is not considered suitable for analysis of human activity on websites.
* Data is gathered via a component ("tag") in the page, usually written in JavaScript, though Java can be used, and increasingly Flash is used. JQuery and AJAX can also be used in conjunction with a server-side scripting language (such as PHP) to manipulate and (usually) store it in a database, basically enabling complete control over the how data is represented.
* It is easier to add additional information to the tag, which can then be collected by the remote server. For example, information about the visitors' screen sizes, or the price of the goods they purchased, can be added in this way. With logfile analysis, information not normally collected by the web server can only be recorded by modifying the URL.
* Page tagging can report on events which do not involve a request to the web server, such as interactions within Flash movies, partial form completion, mouse events such as onClick, onMouseOver, onFocus, onBlur etc.
* The page tagging service manages the process of assigning cookies to visitors; with logfile analysis, the server has to be configured to do this.
* Page tagging is available to companies who do not have access to their own web servers.
* Lately page tagging has become a standard in web analytics [4].
Economic factors
Logfile analysis is almost always performed in-house. Page tagging can be performed in-house, but it is more often provided as a third-party service. The economic difference between these two models can also be a consideration for a company deciding which to purchase.
* Logfile analysis typically involves a one-off software purchase; however, some vendors are introducing maximum annual page views with additional costs to process additional information. In addition to commercial offerings, several open-source logfile analysis tools are available free of charge.
* For Logfile analysis you have to store and archive your own data, which often grows very large quickly. Although the cost of hardware to do this is minimal, the overhead for an IT department can be considerable. For example, if you run out of disk space your database may start over-writing old entries which can often be irreparable.
* For Logfile analysis you need to maintain the software, including updates and security patches.
* Complex page tagging vendors charge a monthly fee based on volume i.e. number of pageviews per month collected.
Which solution is cheaper to implement depends on the amount of technical expertise within the company, the vendor chosen, the amount of activity seen on the web sites, the depth and type of information sought, and the number of distinct web sites needing statistics.
Regardless of the vendor solution or data collection method employed, the cost of web visitor analysis and interpretation should also be included. That is, the cost of turning raw data into actionable information. This can be from the use of third party consultants, the hiring of an experienced web analyst, or the training of a suitable in-house person. A cost-benefit analysis can then be performed. For example, what revenue increase or cost savings can be gained by analysing the web visitor data?
Hybrid methods
Some companies are now producing programs that collect data through both logfiles and page tagging. By using a hybrid method, they aim to produce more accurate statistics than either method on its own. The first Hybrid solution was produced in 1998 by Rufus Evison, who then spun the product out to create a company based upon the increased accuracy of hybrid methods [2][5].
Visitors Geolocation
With IP geolocation, it is possible to track visitors location. Using IP geolocation database or API, visitors can be geolocated to city, region or country level[6].
IP Intelligence, or Internet Protocol (IP) Intelligence, is a technology that maps the Internet and catalogues IP addresses by parameters such as geographic location (country, region, state, city and postcode), connection type, Internet Service Provider (ISP), proxy information, and more. The first generation of IP Intelligence was referred to as geotargeting or geolocation technology. This information is used by businesses for online audience segmentation in applications such online advertising, behavioral targeting, content localization (or website localization), digital rights management, personalization, online fraud detection, geographic rights management, localized search, enhanced analytics, global traffic management, and content distribution.
Click analytics
Click analytics is a special type of web analytics that gives special attention to clicks (Point-and-click).
Commonly, click analytics focuses on on-site analytics. An editor of a web site uses click analytics to determine the performance of his or her particular site, with regards to where the users of the site are clicking.
Also, click analytics may happen real-time or "unreal"-time, depending on the type of information sought. Typically, front-page editors on high-traffic news media sites will want to monitor their pages in real-time, to optimize the content. Editors, designers or other types of stakeholders may analyze clicks on a wider time frame to aid them assess performance of writers, design elements or advertisements etc.
Data about clicks may be gathered in at least two ways. Ideally, a click is "logged" when it occurs, and this method requires some functionality that picks up relevant information when the event occurs. Alternatively, one may institute the assumption that a page view is a result of a click, and therefore log a simulated click that lead to that page view.
Customer lifecycle analytics
Customer lifecycle analytics is a visitor-centric approach to measuring that falls under the umbrella of lifecycle marketing.[citation needed] Page views, clicks and other events (such as API calls, access to third-party services, etc.) are all tied to an individual visitor instead of being stored as separate data points. Customer lifecycle analytics attempts to connect all the data points into a marketing funnel that can offer insights into visitor behavior and website optimization.[citation needed]
Other methods
Other methods of data collection are sometimes used. Packet sniffing collects data by sniffing the network traffic passing between the web server and the outside world. Packet sniffing involves no changes to the web pages or web servers. Integrating web analytics into the web server software itself is also possible.[7] Both these methods claim to provide better real-time data than other methods.
Key definitions
There are no globally agreed definitions within web analytics as the industry bodies have been trying to agree definitions that are useful and definitive for some time. The main bodies who have had input in this area have been JICWEBS (The Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards in the UK and Ireland), ABCe (Audit Bureau of Circulations electronic, UK and Europe), The WAA (Web Analytics Association, US) and to a lesser extent the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau). This does not prevent the following list from being a useful guide, suffering only slightly from ambiguity. Both the WAA and the ABCe provide more definitive lists for those who are declaring their statistics using the metrics defined by either.
* Hit - A request for a file from the web server. Available only in log analysis. The number of hits received by a website is frequently cited to assert its popularity, but this number is extremely misleading and dramatically over-estimates popularity. A single web-page typically consists of multiple (often dozens) of discrete files, each of which is counted as a hit as the page is downloaded, so the number of hits is really an arbitrary number more reflective of the complexity of individual pages on the website than the website's actual popularity. The total number of visitors or page views provides a more realistic and accurate assessment of popularity.
* Page view - A request for a file whose type is defined as a page in log analysis. An occurrence of the script being run in page tagging. In log analysis, a single page view may generate multiple hits as all the resources required to view the page (images, .js and .css files) are also requested from the web server.
* Visit / Session - A visit is defined as a series of page requests from the same uniquely identified client with a time of no more than 30 minutes between each page request. A session is defined as a series of page requests from the same uniquely identified client with a time of no more than 30 minutes and no requests for pages from other domains intervening between page requests. In other words, a session ends when someone goes to another site, or 30 minutes elapse between pageviews, whichever comes first. A visit ends only after a 30 minute time delay. If someone leaves a site, then returns within 30 minutes, this will count as one visit but two sessions. In practice, most systems ignore sessions and many analysts use both terms for visits. Because time between pageviews is critical to the definition of visits and sessions, a single page view does not constitute a visit or a session (it is a "bounce").
* First Visit / First Session - A visit from a visitor who has not made any previous visits.
* Visitor / Unique Visitor / Unique User - The uniquely identified client generating requests on the web server (log analysis) or viewing pages (page tagging) within a defined time period (i.e. day, week or month). A Unique Visitor counts once within the timescale. A visitor can make multiple visits. Identification is made to the visitor's computer, not the person, usually via cookie and/or IP+User Agent. Thus the same person visiting from two different computers will count as two Unique Visitors. Increasingly visitors are uniquely identified by Flash LSO's (Local Shared Object), which are less susceptible to privacy enforcement.
* Repeat Visitor - A visitor that has made at least one previous visit. The period between the last and current visit is called visitor recency and is measured in days.
* New Visitor - A visitor that has not made any previous visits. This definition creates a certain amount of confusion (see common confusions below), and is sometimes substituted with analysis of first visits.
* Impression - An impression is each time an advertisement loads on a user's screen. Anytime you see a banner, that is an impression.
* Singletons - The number of visits where only a single page is viewed. While not a useful metric in and of itself the number of singletons is indicative of various forms of Click fraud as well as being used to calculate bounce rate and in some cases to identify automatons bots.
* Bounce Rate - The percentage of visits where the visitor enters and exits at the same page without visiting any other pages on the site in between.
* % Exit - The percentage of users who exit from a page.
* Visibility time - The time a single page (or a blog, Ad Banner...) is viewed.
* Session Duration - Average amount of time that visitors spend on the site each time they visit. This metric can be complicated by the fact that analytics programs can not measure the length of the final page view[8].
* Page View Duration / Time on Page - Average amount of time that visitors spend on each page of the site. As with Session Duration, this metric is complicated by the fact that analytics programs can not measure the length of the final page view unless they record a page close event, such as onUnload().
* Active Time / Engagement Time - Average amount of time that visitors spend actually interacting with content on a web page, based on mouse moves, clicks, hovers and scrolls. Unlike Session Duration and Page View Duration / Time on Page, this metric can accurately measure the length of engagement in the final page view.
* Page Depth / Page Views per Session - Page Depth is the average number of page views a visitor consumes before ending their session. It is calculated by dividing total number of page views by total number of sessions and is also called Page Views per Session or PV/Session.
* Frequency / Session per Unique - Frequency measures how often visitors come to a website. It is calculated by dividing the total number of sessions (or visits) by the total number of unique visitors. Sometimes it is used to measure the loyalty of your audience.
* Click path - the sequence of hyperlinks one or more website visitors follows on a given site.
* Click - "refers to a single instance of a user following a hyperlink from one page in a site to another"[9]. Some use click analytics to analyze their web sites.
* Site Overlay is a technique in which graphical statistics are shown besides each link on the web page. These statistics represent the percentage of clicks on each link.
Common sources of confusion in web analytics
The hotel problem
The hotel problem is generally the first problem encountered by a user of web analytics. The term was first coined by Rufus Evison explaining the problem at one of the Emetrics Summits and has now gained popularity as a simple expression of the problem and its resolution.
The problem is that the unique visitors for each day in a month do not add up to the same total as the unique visitors for that month. This appears to an inexperienced user to be a problem in whatever analytics software they are using. In fact it is a simple property of the metric definitions.
The way to picture the situation is by imagining a hotel. The hotel has two rooms (Room A and Room B).
Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Total
Room A John John Jane 2 Unique Users
Room B Mark Jane Mark 2 Unique Users
Total 2 2 2 ?
As the table shows, the hotel has two unique users each day over three days. The sum of the totals with respect to the days is therefore six.
During the period each room has had two unique users. The sum of the totals with respect to the rooms is therefore four.
Actually only three visitors have been in the hotel over this period. The problem is that a person who stays in a room for two nights will get counted twice if you count them once on each day, but is only counted once if you are looking at the total for the period. Any software for web analytics will sum these correctly for whatever time period, thus leading to the problem when a user tries to compare the totals.
New visitors + Repeat visitors unequal to total visitors
Another common misconception in web analytics is that the sum of the new visitors and the repeat visitors ought to be the total number of visitors. Again this becomes clear if the visitors are viewed as individuals on a small scale, but still causes a large number of complaints that analytics software cannot be working because of a failure to understand the metrics.
Here the culprit is the metric of a new visitor. There is really no such thing as a new visitor when you are considering a web site from an ongoing perspective. If a visitor makes their first visit on a given day and then returns to the web site on the same day they are both a new visitor and a repeat visitor for that day. So if we look at them as an individual which are they? The answer has to be both, so the definition of the metric is at fault.
A new visitor is not an individual; it is a fact of the web measurement. For this reason it is easiest to conceptualize the same facet as a first visit (or first session). This resolves the conflict and so removes the confusion. Nobody expects the number of first visits to add to the number of repeat visitors to give the total number of visitors. The metric will have the same number as the new visitors, but it is clearer that it will not add in this fashion.
On the day in question there was a first visit made by our chosen individual. There was also a repeat visit made by the same individual. The number of first visits and the number of repeat visits will add up to the total number of visits for that day.
Web analytics methods
Problems with cookies
Historically, vendors of page-tagging analytics solutions have used third-party cookies sent from the vendor's domain instead of the domain of the website being browsed. Third-party cookies can handle visitors who cross multiple unrelated domains within the company's site, since the cookie is always handled by the vendor's servers.
However, third-party cookies in principle allow tracking an individual user across the sites of different companies, allowing the analytics vendor to collate the user's activity on sites where he provided personal information with his activity on other sites where he thought he was anonymous. Although web analytics companies deny doing this, other companies such as companies supplying banner ads have done so. Privacy concerns about cookies have therefore led a noticeable minority of users to block or delete third-party cookies. In 2005, some reports showed that about 28% of Internet users blocked third-party cookies and 22% deleted them at least once a month.[10]
Most vendors of page tagging solutions have now moved to provide at least the option of using first-party cookies (cookies assigned from the client subdomain).
Another problem is cookie deletion. When web analytics depend on cookies to identify unique visitors, the statistics are dependent on a persistent cookie to hold a unique visitor ID. When users delete cookies, they usually delete both first- and third-party cookies. If this is done between interactions with the site, the user will appear as a first-time visitor at their next interaction point. Without a persistent and unique visitor id, conversions, click-stream analysis, and other metrics dependent on the activities of a unique visitor over time, cannot be accurate.
Cookies are used because IP addresses are not always unique to users and may be shared by large groups or proxies. Other methods of uniquely identifying a user are technically challenging and would limit the trackable audience or would be considered suspicious. Cookies are the selected option[who?] because they reach the lowest common denominator without using technologies regarded as spyware[citation needed].
Unique landing pages vs referrals for campaign tracking
Tracking the amount of activity generated through advertising relationships with external web sites through the referrals reports available in most web analytics packages is significantly less accurate than using unique landing pages.
Secure analytics (metering) methods
All the methods described above (and some other methods not mentioned here, like sampling) have the central problem of being vulnerable to manipulation (both inflation and deflation). This means these methods are imprecise and insecure (in any reasonable model of security). This issue has been addressed in a number of papers [11] [12] [13] [14], but to-date the solutions suggested in these papers remain theoretic, possibly due to lack of interest from the engineering community, or because of financial gain the current situation provides to the owners of big websites. For more details, consult the aforementioned papers
Web analytics is not just a tool for measuring website traffic but can be used as a tool for business research and market research. Web analytics applications can also help companies measure the results of traditional print advertising campaigns. It helps one to estimate how the traffic to the website changed after the launch of a new advertising campaign. Web analytics provides data on the number of visitors, page views, etc. to gauge the traffic and popularity trends which helps doing the market research.
There are two categories
of web analytics; off-site and on-site web analytics.
Off-site web analytics refers to web measurement and analysis regardless of whether you own or maintain a website. It includes the measurement of a website's potential audience (opportunity), share of voice (visibility), and buzz (comments) that is happening on the Internet as a whole.
On-site web analytics measure a visitor's journey once on your website. This includes its drivers and conversions; for example, which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase. On-site web analytics measures the performance of your website in a commercial context. This data is typically compared against key performance indicators for performance, and used to improve a web site or marketing campaign's audience response.
Historically, web analytics has referred to on-site visitor measurement. However in recent years this has blurred, mainly because vendors are producing tools that span both categories.
The remainder of this article concerns on-site web analytics.
Contents
* 1 On-site web analytics technologies
o 1.1 Web server logfile analysis
o 1.2 Page tagging
o 1.3 Logfile analysis vs page tagging
+ 1.3.1 Advantages of logfile analysis
+ 1.3.2 Advantages of page tagging
+ 1.3.3 Economic factors
o 1.4 Hybrid methods
o 1.5 Visitors Geolocation
o 1.6 Click analytics
o 1.7 Customer lifecycle analytics
o 1.8 Other methods
* 2 Key definitions
* 3 Common sources of confusion in web analytics
o 3.1 The hotel problem
o 3.2 New visitors + Repeat visitors unequal to total visitors
* 4 Web analytics methods
o 4.1 Problems with cookies
o 4.2 Unique landing pages vs referrals for campaign tracking
* 5 Secure analytics (metering) methods
* 6 See also
* 7 References
* 8 Bibliography
* 9 External links
On-site web analytics technologies
Many different vendors provide on-site web analytics software and services. There are two main technological approaches to collecting the data. The first method, logfile analysis, reads the logfiles in which the web server records all its transactions. The second method, page tagging, uses JavaScript on each page to notify a third-party server when a page is rendered by a web browser. Both collect data that can be processed to produce web traffic reports.
In addition other data sources may also be added to augment the data. For example; e-mail response rates, direct mail campaign data, sales and lead information, user performance data such as click heat mapping, or other custom metrics as needed.
Web server logfile analysis
Web servers record some of their transactions in a logfile. It was soon realized that these logfiles could be read by a program to provide data on the popularity of the website. Thus arose web log analysis software.
In the early 1990s, web site statistics consisted primarily of counting the number of client requests (or hits) made to the web server. This was a reasonable method initially, since each web site often consisted of a single HTML file. However, with the introduction of images in HTML, and web sites that spanned multiple HTML files, this count became less useful. The first true commercial Log Analyzer was released by IPRO in 1994 [2].
Two units of measure were introduced in the mid 1990s to gauge more accurately the amount of human activity on web servers. These were page views and visits (or sessions). A page view was defined as a request made to the web server for a page, as opposed to a graphic, while a visit was defined as a sequence of requests from a uniquely identified client that expired after a certain amount of inactivity, usually 30 minutes. The page views and visits are still commonly displayed metrics, but are now considered rather rudimentary.
The emergence of search engine spiders and robots in the late 1990s, along with web proxies and dynamically assigned IP addresses for large companies and ISPs, made it more difficult to identify unique human visitors to a website. Log analyzers responded by tracking visits by cookies, and by ignoring requests from known spiders.
The extensive use of web caches also presented a problem for logfile analysis. If a person revisits a page, the second request will often be retrieved from the browser's cache, and so no request will be received by the web server. This means that the person's path through the site is lost. Caching can be defeated by configuring the web server, but this can result in degraded performance for the visitor to the website.
Page tagging
Concerns about the accuracy of logfile analysis in the presence of caching, and the desire to be able to perform web analytics as an outsourced service, led to the second data collection method, page tagging or 'Web bugs'.
In the mid 1990s, Web counters were commonly seen — these were images included in a web page that showed the number of times the image had been requested, which was an estimate of the number of visits to that page. In the late 1990s this concept evolved to include a small invisible image instead of a visible one, and, by using JavaScript, to pass along with the image request certain information about the page and the visitor. This information can then be processed remotely by a web analytics company, and extensive statistics generated.
The web analytics service also manages the process of assigning a cookie to the user, which can uniquely identify them during their visit and in subsequent visits. Cookie acceptance rates vary significantly between web sites and may affect the quality of data collected and reported.
Collecting web site data using a third-party data collection server (or even an in-house data collection server) requires an additional DNS look-up by the user's computer to determine the IP address of the collection server. On occasion, delays in completing a successful or failed DNS look-ups may result in data not being collected.
With the increasing popularity of Ajax-based solutions, an alternative to the use of an invisible image, is to implement a call back to the server from the rendered page. In this case, when the page is rendered on the web browser, a piece of Ajax code would call back to the server and pass information about the client that can then be aggregated by a web analytics company. This is in some ways flawed by browser restrictions on the servers which can be contacted with XmlHttpRequest objects.
Logfile analysis vs page tagging
Both logfile analysis programs and page tagging solutions are readily available to companies that wish to perform web analytics. In some cases, the same web analytics company will offer both approaches. The question then arises of which method a company should choose. There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach[3].
Advantages of logfile analysis
The main advantages of logfile analysis over page tagging are as follows:
* The web server normally already produces logfiles, so the raw data is already available. To collect data via page tagging requires changes to the website.
* The data is on the company's own servers, and is in a standard, rather than a proprietary, format. This makes it easy for a company to switch programs later, use several different programs, and analyze historical data with a new program.
* Page tagging solutions can involve vendor lock-in, but this problem can be avoided by using some type of include to embed the tracking code on each page from one file. It can then easily be changed for all pages simply by changing it in this one file, thus making it possible to easily add and remove analytics platforms without changing each page individually.
* Logfiles contain information on visits from search engine spiders. Although these should not be reported as part of the human activity, it is useful information for search engine optimization.
* Logfiles require no additional DNS Lookups. Thus there are no external server calls which can slow page load speeds, or result in uncounted page views.
* The web server reliably records every transaction it makes. Page tagging may not be able to record all transactions. Reasons include:
o Page tagging relies on the visitors' browsers co-operating, which a certain proportion may not do (for example, if JavaScript is disabled, or a hosts file prohibits requests to certain servers).
o Tags may be omitted from pages either by oversight or between bouts of additional page tagging.
o It may not be possible to include tags in all pages. Examples include static content such as PDFs or application-generated dynamic pages where re-engineering the application to include tags is not an option.
Advantages of page tagging
The main advantages of page tagging over logfile analysis are as follows.
* Counting is activated by opening the page, not requesting it from the server. If a page is cached, it will not be counted by the server. Cached pages can account for up to one-third of all pageviews. Not counting cached pages seriously skews many site metrics. It is for this reason server-based log analysis is not considered suitable for analysis of human activity on websites.
* Data is gathered via a component ("tag") in the page, usually written in JavaScript, though Java can be used, and increasingly Flash is used. JQuery and AJAX can also be used in conjunction with a server-side scripting language (such as PHP) to manipulate and (usually) store it in a database, basically enabling complete control over the how data is represented.
* It is easier to add additional information to the tag, which can then be collected by the remote server. For example, information about the visitors' screen sizes, or the price of the goods they purchased, can be added in this way. With logfile analysis, information not normally collected by the web server can only be recorded by modifying the URL.
* Page tagging can report on events which do not involve a request to the web server, such as interactions within Flash movies, partial form completion, mouse events such as onClick, onMouseOver, onFocus, onBlur etc.
* The page tagging service manages the process of assigning cookies to visitors; with logfile analysis, the server has to be configured to do this.
* Page tagging is available to companies who do not have access to their own web servers.
* Lately page tagging has become a standard in web analytics [4].
Economic factors
Logfile analysis is almost always performed in-house. Page tagging can be performed in-house, but it is more often provided as a third-party service. The economic difference between these two models can also be a consideration for a company deciding which to purchase.
* Logfile analysis typically involves a one-off software purchase; however, some vendors are introducing maximum annual page views with additional costs to process additional information. In addition to commercial offerings, several open-source logfile analysis tools are available free of charge.
* For Logfile analysis you have to store and archive your own data, which often grows very large quickly. Although the cost of hardware to do this is minimal, the overhead for an IT department can be considerable. For example, if you run out of disk space your database may start over-writing old entries which can often be irreparable.
* For Logfile analysis you need to maintain the software, including updates and security patches.
* Complex page tagging vendors charge a monthly fee based on volume i.e. number of pageviews per month collected.
Which solution is cheaper to implement depends on the amount of technical expertise within the company, the vendor chosen, the amount of activity seen on the web sites, the depth and type of information sought, and the number of distinct web sites needing statistics.
Regardless of the vendor solution or data collection method employed, the cost of web visitor analysis and interpretation should also be included. That is, the cost of turning raw data into actionable information. This can be from the use of third party consultants, the hiring of an experienced web analyst, or the training of a suitable in-house person. A cost-benefit analysis can then be performed. For example, what revenue increase or cost savings can be gained by analysing the web visitor data?
Hybrid methods
Some companies are now producing programs that collect data through both logfiles and page tagging. By using a hybrid method, they aim to produce more accurate statistics than either method on its own. The first Hybrid solution was produced in 1998 by Rufus Evison, who then spun the product out to create a company based upon the increased accuracy of hybrid methods [2][5].
Visitors Geolocation
With IP geolocation, it is possible to track visitors location. Using IP geolocation database or API, visitors can be geolocated to city, region or country level[6].
IP Intelligence, or Internet Protocol (IP) Intelligence, is a technology that maps the Internet and catalogues IP addresses by parameters such as geographic location (country, region, state, city and postcode), connection type, Internet Service Provider (ISP), proxy information, and more. The first generation of IP Intelligence was referred to as geotargeting or geolocation technology. This information is used by businesses for online audience segmentation in applications such online advertising, behavioral targeting, content localization (or website localization), digital rights management, personalization, online fraud detection, geographic rights management, localized search, enhanced analytics, global traffic management, and content distribution.
Click analytics
Click analytics is a special type of web analytics that gives special attention to clicks (Point-and-click).
Commonly, click analytics focuses on on-site analytics. An editor of a web site uses click analytics to determine the performance of his or her particular site, with regards to where the users of the site are clicking.
Also, click analytics may happen real-time or "unreal"-time, depending on the type of information sought. Typically, front-page editors on high-traffic news media sites will want to monitor their pages in real-time, to optimize the content. Editors, designers or other types of stakeholders may analyze clicks on a wider time frame to aid them assess performance of writers, design elements or advertisements etc.
Data about clicks may be gathered in at least two ways. Ideally, a click is "logged" when it occurs, and this method requires some functionality that picks up relevant information when the event occurs. Alternatively, one may institute the assumption that a page view is a result of a click, and therefore log a simulated click that lead to that page view.
Customer lifecycle analytics
Customer lifecycle analytics is a visitor-centric approach to measuring that falls under the umbrella of lifecycle marketing.[citation needed] Page views, clicks and other events (such as API calls, access to third-party services, etc.) are all tied to an individual visitor instead of being stored as separate data points. Customer lifecycle analytics attempts to connect all the data points into a marketing funnel that can offer insights into visitor behavior and website optimization.[citation needed]
Other methods
Other methods of data collection are sometimes used. Packet sniffing collects data by sniffing the network traffic passing between the web server and the outside world. Packet sniffing involves no changes to the web pages or web servers. Integrating web analytics into the web server software itself is also possible.[7] Both these methods claim to provide better real-time data than other methods.
Key definitions
There are no globally agreed definitions within web analytics as the industry bodies have been trying to agree definitions that are useful and definitive for some time. The main bodies who have had input in this area have been JICWEBS (The Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards in the UK and Ireland), ABCe (Audit Bureau of Circulations electronic, UK and Europe), The WAA (Web Analytics Association, US) and to a lesser extent the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau). This does not prevent the following list from being a useful guide, suffering only slightly from ambiguity. Both the WAA and the ABCe provide more definitive lists for those who are declaring their statistics using the metrics defined by either.
* Hit - A request for a file from the web server. Available only in log analysis. The number of hits received by a website is frequently cited to assert its popularity, but this number is extremely misleading and dramatically over-estimates popularity. A single web-page typically consists of multiple (often dozens) of discrete files, each of which is counted as a hit as the page is downloaded, so the number of hits is really an arbitrary number more reflective of the complexity of individual pages on the website than the website's actual popularity. The total number of visitors or page views provides a more realistic and accurate assessment of popularity.
* Page view - A request for a file whose type is defined as a page in log analysis. An occurrence of the script being run in page tagging. In log analysis, a single page view may generate multiple hits as all the resources required to view the page (images, .js and .css files) are also requested from the web server.
* Visit / Session - A visit is defined as a series of page requests from the same uniquely identified client with a time of no more than 30 minutes between each page request. A session is defined as a series of page requests from the same uniquely identified client with a time of no more than 30 minutes and no requests for pages from other domains intervening between page requests. In other words, a session ends when someone goes to another site, or 30 minutes elapse between pageviews, whichever comes first. A visit ends only after a 30 minute time delay. If someone leaves a site, then returns within 30 minutes, this will count as one visit but two sessions. In practice, most systems ignore sessions and many analysts use both terms for visits. Because time between pageviews is critical to the definition of visits and sessions, a single page view does not constitute a visit or a session (it is a "bounce").
* First Visit / First Session - A visit from a visitor who has not made any previous visits.
* Visitor / Unique Visitor / Unique User - The uniquely identified client generating requests on the web server (log analysis) or viewing pages (page tagging) within a defined time period (i.e. day, week or month). A Unique Visitor counts once within the timescale. A visitor can make multiple visits. Identification is made to the visitor's computer, not the person, usually via cookie and/or IP+User Agent. Thus the same person visiting from two different computers will count as two Unique Visitors. Increasingly visitors are uniquely identified by Flash LSO's (Local Shared Object), which are less susceptible to privacy enforcement.
* Repeat Visitor - A visitor that has made at least one previous visit. The period between the last and current visit is called visitor recency and is measured in days.
* New Visitor - A visitor that has not made any previous visits. This definition creates a certain amount of confusion (see common confusions below), and is sometimes substituted with analysis of first visits.
* Impression - An impression is each time an advertisement loads on a user's screen. Anytime you see a banner, that is an impression.
* Singletons - The number of visits where only a single page is viewed. While not a useful metric in and of itself the number of singletons is indicative of various forms of Click fraud as well as being used to calculate bounce rate and in some cases to identify automatons bots.
* Bounce Rate - The percentage of visits where the visitor enters and exits at the same page without visiting any other pages on the site in between.
* % Exit - The percentage of users who exit from a page.
* Visibility time - The time a single page (or a blog, Ad Banner...) is viewed.
* Session Duration - Average amount of time that visitors spend on the site each time they visit. This metric can be complicated by the fact that analytics programs can not measure the length of the final page view[8].
* Page View Duration / Time on Page - Average amount of time that visitors spend on each page of the site. As with Session Duration, this metric is complicated by the fact that analytics programs can not measure the length of the final page view unless they record a page close event, such as onUnload().
* Active Time / Engagement Time - Average amount of time that visitors spend actually interacting with content on a web page, based on mouse moves, clicks, hovers and scrolls. Unlike Session Duration and Page View Duration / Time on Page, this metric can accurately measure the length of engagement in the final page view.
* Page Depth / Page Views per Session - Page Depth is the average number of page views a visitor consumes before ending their session. It is calculated by dividing total number of page views by total number of sessions and is also called Page Views per Session or PV/Session.
* Frequency / Session per Unique - Frequency measures how often visitors come to a website. It is calculated by dividing the total number of sessions (or visits) by the total number of unique visitors. Sometimes it is used to measure the loyalty of your audience.
* Click path - the sequence of hyperlinks one or more website visitors follows on a given site.
* Click - "refers to a single instance of a user following a hyperlink from one page in a site to another"[9]. Some use click analytics to analyze their web sites.
* Site Overlay is a technique in which graphical statistics are shown besides each link on the web page. These statistics represent the percentage of clicks on each link.
Common sources of confusion in web analytics
The hotel problem
The hotel problem is generally the first problem encountered by a user of web analytics. The term was first coined by Rufus Evison explaining the problem at one of the Emetrics Summits and has now gained popularity as a simple expression of the problem and its resolution.
The problem is that the unique visitors for each day in a month do not add up to the same total as the unique visitors for that month. This appears to an inexperienced user to be a problem in whatever analytics software they are using. In fact it is a simple property of the metric definitions.
The way to picture the situation is by imagining a hotel. The hotel has two rooms (Room A and Room B).
Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Total
Room A John John Jane 2 Unique Users
Room B Mark Jane Mark 2 Unique Users
Total 2 2 2 ?
As the table shows, the hotel has two unique users each day over three days. The sum of the totals with respect to the days is therefore six.
During the period each room has had two unique users. The sum of the totals with respect to the rooms is therefore four.
Actually only three visitors have been in the hotel over this period. The problem is that a person who stays in a room for two nights will get counted twice if you count them once on each day, but is only counted once if you are looking at the total for the period. Any software for web analytics will sum these correctly for whatever time period, thus leading to the problem when a user tries to compare the totals.
New visitors + Repeat visitors unequal to total visitors
Another common misconception in web analytics is that the sum of the new visitors and the repeat visitors ought to be the total number of visitors. Again this becomes clear if the visitors are viewed as individuals on a small scale, but still causes a large number of complaints that analytics software cannot be working because of a failure to understand the metrics.
Here the culprit is the metric of a new visitor. There is really no such thing as a new visitor when you are considering a web site from an ongoing perspective. If a visitor makes their first visit on a given day and then returns to the web site on the same day they are both a new visitor and a repeat visitor for that day. So if we look at them as an individual which are they? The answer has to be both, so the definition of the metric is at fault.
A new visitor is not an individual; it is a fact of the web measurement. For this reason it is easiest to conceptualize the same facet as a first visit (or first session). This resolves the conflict and so removes the confusion. Nobody expects the number of first visits to add to the number of repeat visitors to give the total number of visitors. The metric will have the same number as the new visitors, but it is clearer that it will not add in this fashion.
On the day in question there was a first visit made by our chosen individual. There was also a repeat visit made by the same individual. The number of first visits and the number of repeat visits will add up to the total number of visits for that day.
Web analytics methods
Problems with cookies
Historically, vendors of page-tagging analytics solutions have used third-party cookies sent from the vendor's domain instead of the domain of the website being browsed. Third-party cookies can handle visitors who cross multiple unrelated domains within the company's site, since the cookie is always handled by the vendor's servers.
However, third-party cookies in principle allow tracking an individual user across the sites of different companies, allowing the analytics vendor to collate the user's activity on sites where he provided personal information with his activity on other sites where he thought he was anonymous. Although web analytics companies deny doing this, other companies such as companies supplying banner ads have done so. Privacy concerns about cookies have therefore led a noticeable minority of users to block or delete third-party cookies. In 2005, some reports showed that about 28% of Internet users blocked third-party cookies and 22% deleted them at least once a month.[10]
Most vendors of page tagging solutions have now moved to provide at least the option of using first-party cookies (cookies assigned from the client subdomain).
Another problem is cookie deletion. When web analytics depend on cookies to identify unique visitors, the statistics are dependent on a persistent cookie to hold a unique visitor ID. When users delete cookies, they usually delete both first- and third-party cookies. If this is done between interactions with the site, the user will appear as a first-time visitor at their next interaction point. Without a persistent and unique visitor id, conversions, click-stream analysis, and other metrics dependent on the activities of a unique visitor over time, cannot be accurate.
Cookies are used because IP addresses are not always unique to users and may be shared by large groups or proxies. Other methods of uniquely identifying a user are technically challenging and would limit the trackable audience or would be considered suspicious. Cookies are the selected option[who?] because they reach the lowest common denominator without using technologies regarded as spyware[citation needed].
Unique landing pages vs referrals for campaign tracking
Tracking the amount of activity generated through advertising relationships with external web sites through the referrals reports available in most web analytics packages is significantly less accurate than using unique landing pages.
Secure analytics (metering) methods
All the methods described above (and some other methods not mentioned here, like sampling) have the central problem of being vulnerable to manipulation (both inflation and deflation). This means these methods are imprecise and insecure (in any reasonable model of security). This issue has been addressed in a number of papers [11] [12] [13] [14], but to-date the solutions suggested in these papers remain theoretic, possibly due to lack of interest from the engineering community, or because of financial gain the current situation provides to the owners of big websites. For more details, consult the aforementioned papers
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