What does 'hostname' mean?

[irock]

Hi, when I was looking for my log, I noticed there's a column named 'hostname.' An example would be: ip197.eq.pricegrabber.com (64.156.13.197)

What can I tell from this info? Is this guy from some ISP proxy or what?

Thanks!

[jpjones]

Not an ISP proxy.
Looks more like an employee or a bot from pricegrabber.com

If your site is ecommerce of some description, then they could be scraping information from your site to use in their comparison database.

[irock]

But the visiting pattern looks awfully like a human being surfing to me.

[jpjones]

It could simply be a case of an employee finding your site in his breaktime and was innocently surfing around.

Do your logs show the referrer site from when they first came to your site?

[irock]

Nope, the guy entered my site by typing my URL (my guess) and existed the site from my homepage.

[Wild_Cujo]

>>Nope, the guy entered my site by typing my URL (my guess) and existed the site from my homepage.

Or the referral information was block would be a better bet...ecspecialy if its a bot, I would guess if it was a bot it would have a unique UA.

[irock]

What is a unique UA?

Thanks!

[jpjones]

UA = User Agent.

You'll find it in your logs towards the end of each line. Typical examples of UA's include:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0; T
312461)
Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)

It tells you what browser the visitor to your site is using (in the first two examples), or if the visitor is in fact a spider bot (as in the third googlebot example).

The Unique User Agent mentioned by Wild_Cujo can be seen by Googlebot. Only Googlebot has the UA above - no other browser *should* be using it (though sometimes people forge the details, but thats for another thread).
JP