Analytics
A Guide to Using MediaWiki in a Hosted Environment
An instructional website by the developer of mh370wiki.net - a MediaWiki site about Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.
Website Analytics or Statistics
cPanel has a section headed Metrics.
- Visitors
- 'This function displays up to 1,000 of the most recent entries in the domain’s web server log.'
Select the domain and click on the magnify icon to open the Visitors page.
The Visitors page lists visitors by IP Address and Time, the URL for the visited page and the number of bytes of data downloaded, and the browser type. - Bandwidth
- 'This function allows you to see the bandwidth usage for your site. It shows the current month’s bandwidth usage, as well as your total bandwidth usage. This includes all HTTP (web) and POP (mail) bandwidth usage. This may also include FTP bandwidth usage if your system administrator enabled FTP bandwidth logging.'
Graphs show the bandwidth used on your account, for all websites at that hosting service, over time periods - 24 hours, past week and past year.
Additional charts show the data downloaded per month by protocol, mostly HTTP, but also FTP, IMAP, POP3 and SMTP if used.
The total download per month is shown in GB. - Resource Usage
- This is a resource usage dashboard which can show Current Usage, and a Snapshot by process.
It is also where I often see messages like 'You have reached the limits within the past 24 hours' and 'CPU resources limit was reached for your site'. - Site Quality Monitoring
- This is a subscription service. To use it, add a website for monitoring. Alerts will be sent by email.
The on-screen display for each monitored website shows coloured bars for Uptime, Performance, Search engine optimisation, Content, Security and technology. - Raw Access
- 'Raw Access Logs allow you to see who has visited your website without displaying graphs, charts, or other graphics. You can use the Raw Access Logs menu to download a zipped version of the server’s access log for your site. This can be very useful when you want to quickly see who has visited your site.'
Configuration options allow logs to be archived and/or removed at the end of each month. - Errors
- 'The function displays the most recent entries in your website’s error logs in reverse chronological order. You can use this information to find broken links or problems with missing files. For more information, read our documentation.'
When compiling this summary, this page had two nice messages - 'No recent web server errors exist for your domain: ', and 'No recent suEXEC events exist for your domain: '.
The domain named is the first one registered when the hosting account is created. Additional domains are treated as sub-domains on the account. So any error shown on this page would be related to the whole hosting account. - AWstats
- 'Awstats produces visual statistics about visitors of your site.'
Select the domain and click on the magnify icon to open the Statistics page.
Traffic statistics are presented in many ways:-- graphs and tables for time periods - year, month, day and hour.
- Pages, Hits and Bandwidth by Locale (country)
- Hosts (IP Addresses) and the number of Pages, Hits and Bandwidth
- A list of Robots/Spiders visitors
- Visits Duration - Number of Visits by time period, for example 0s - 30s up to 1hour+
- A list of most popular pages, a list of search keyphrases, and a list of search keywords
- and more...
Articles which relate to Website Analytics
Articles which relate to Website Analytics are included in Category:Analytics.
The CategoryTree Extension enables a listing of relevant sub-categories and pages:-
Statistics and the mh370wiki.net website
In November 2025 this site got 511,160 hits from 409,929 unique visitors and a total of 4.23GB of data was transferred.
48 different robots or spiders patrolled the site (up from the previous month). Three of those are run by Google, Bing and Yandex and they are specifically allowed. Some robots have since been disallowed by additions to robots.txt.
296 visitors spent over an hour on the website.
In November the top countries were Vietnam, Brazil, United States, Japan and China. This varies by month. Even though flight MH370 was Malaysian, interest comes from all over the world and traffic from Malaysia is usually quite low.
Browsers used were Google Chrome, Safari, Opera and Firefox way ahead of Internet Explorer and Edge.
Conclusion
The data provided by cPanel --> Metrics is useful, and should be reviewed regularly.
The number of visitors and hits used to be a reflection of real people doing real browsing but over time the scale has become an issue of concern.
It is helpful to know where your viewers come from, what operating systems and browsers are used. More people use Safari than I imagined, so I should see how the website looks in that browser.
Search phrases and keywords can be used to refine search engine optimisation. If people search for something and it is not found then (if relevant) the content can be added.
Error 404 messages are often generated because people try things, not because the page is missing. The MediaWiki --> Tools --> Special Pages --> Maintenance reports --> Wanted pages can be used to locate pages that are actually missing.