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AWStats reads your Apache logs and produces a graphical report per domain. It’s the analytics view most accounts actually look at. Webalizer and Analog Stats are also available, but AWStats has the cleanest UI and the most useful breakdowns.
Awstats domain list with the View link per row

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Open a report

Each domain on the account shows up as a row. Click View to open that domain’s report in a new tab. The report has its own URL (something like awstats.yourdomain.com-style) but is only accessible from inside cPanel. The page that opens is the standard AWStats UI. Sections, top to bottom:
  • Summary: visits, unique visitors, pages viewed, hits, bandwidth, all for the selected month.
  • When: daily, hourly, day-of-week breakdowns.
  • Who: top countries, top hosts, robots/spiders, last visit time per host.
  • Navigation: entry pages, exit pages, top URLs by visit count.
  • Referrers: origin (direct, search engine, external link), top referring URLs, top search engines, top search terms.
  • Browsers and OS: user agent breakdowns.
  • HTTP errors: 404s, 500s, with the offending URL.
The month selector at the top jumps between months. AWStats keeps a year of monthly snapshots.

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How fresh is the data

AWStats updates once per day, around server midnight (server time, UTC+0 for most Noxity nodes). Today’s traffic shows up tomorrow morning. For real-time, use Visitors instead. If the report says “Reported period: not yet finished” near the top, you’re looking at the in-progress current month, which is normal.

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What it’s better at than Webalizer

  • Search-term breakdown is more reliable. Webalizer often groups everything under “(no referrer)”.
  • Robot detection is up to date. Webalizer hasn’t been actively maintained in years and misses modern bots.
  • HTTP error reporting points at the URL that 404’d, not just the count.
  • The UI is faster to navigate; everything’s on one long page with anchor links at the top.
For comparison side by side, you can keep both running via Metrics Editor.

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What AWStats can’t tell you

  • Page load time. It only sees server-side log data, not client-side timings. For real user metrics use a tool like Cloudflare Web Analytics or your own JS beacon.
  • Logged-in vs anonymous. AWStats doesn’t differentiate, because Apache logs don’t either. For that, your application has to track it.
  • Conversions or funnels. Same reason: those are application-level concepts.
AWStats counts every hit, including assets (images, CSS, JS). The “Pages” line filters to HTML-ish responses, which is closer to what most people mean by “pageviews”.

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Common issues

Either AWStats hasn’t run yet (it runs once a day), or the domain is excluded in Metrics Editor. Check both.
AWStats counts bots; client-side tools like Google Analytics don’t. The gap is usually 30–60% on a typical site. Check the Robots/Spiders visitors section to see which bots are inflating the number.
Either nobody’s visiting it (likely on a low-traffic site), or it’s served from cache by Cloudflare or another CDN, in which case AWStats never sees the request. Origin-only logs miss CDN-served traffic.

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