Finding a competent web host is one of the least desirable things ever as I've already called two dozen web hosts today alone without any success. My main issue is the policy to split Apache access logs in to daily access logs instead of the much more manageable monthly access logs. I know that the virtualhost setting can override this for individual hosts though no web host is willing to take the twenty seconds to do this in order to make a sale.
So I considered the what if scenario...what if I swallow this poor industry-wide plague and work to merge uh, 365 log files?
Well first off I did find a program that will merge files, even letting me drag and drop them from Windows Explorer, great!
The main problem in that scenario is having to manually open 28~31 logs per month and having to do that every month because web admins are too lazy to change a single virtualhost setting.
Oh and to those who say I should stick to daily logs, then you can go ahead and merge them for me for free. Time is money and I don't feel I should be forced to waste my time because people are too lazy to make clients happy. Sure log files may get large (1GB per 100GB of traffic) though these are still compressed and I don't have nearly that amount of traffic...and again the time and thus money to blow doing something manually that should have stayed automated in the first place! Also I do not use third parties for statistical analysis nor am willing to reduce the quality of my analysis to outsource to a third party.
So right now I'm trying to figure out if there is a way I can extract upwards of 31 log files from 31 gzip files as a single file or automate the extraction process that or find a host willing to make a sale by getting off their butt for twenty seconds.
- John
