Hello!
I use AWStats to track my web site's visitors(through hoster's CPanel).
As far as I know, awstats is not supposed to consider bots and other non-humans as unique visitors (in hosts list, but nevertheless, I found MSNbot IP in the list! Why?
I probably just misunderstand it. Let's say, if we take May 2010...
In summary I see that I have 76 unique visitors. Also I see that they don't count bots as visitors because where it says "Not viewed traffic" there're no any unique visitors.
(* Not viewed traffic includes traffic generated by robots, worms, or replies with special HTTP status codes.) By the way, is it reasonable that I have 30 MB of viewed traffic and 2 MB of not viewed?
Then I go down the list to "Hosts" . There I see this : "Hosts : 0 Known, 77 Unknown (unresolved ip)
76 Unique visitors"
Then I click on "full list". And I see this IP: 207.46.195.213 and nslookup shows that its MSNBot.
I also have 1 unresolved IP (what's that?)...In any case, MSNBot is resolved one (if I understand this correctly . The last and only IP in the list doesn't have any statistics near it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but a term "unresolved IP" has more to do with reverse DNS lookup and it's not relevant to my original inquiry (real people vs. non-humans).
Of course, I can "deduct" my own IPs plus well known search bots from the list, but I don't know IPs of spam bots etc. So how I can find out from the list how many REAL PEOPLE actually visited my site? I realize that same person might have another IP so here I assume that every IP means a separate person. (In any case, even if the same person uses few different IPs, then usually they would be under the same subnet, so its easy to distinguish, say 23.12.10.20; 23.12.10.21 etc. or 23.13.40.17 if we take it "more extreme".
My conclusion is that by using AWStats I won't know how many people visited my site.
And the only way it could help me is to show the TENDENCY (upward or downward) of my site's visiting. Say, if I get in May 100 unique visitors and in June 200, then I'm doing fine. Again, here I assume that my site gets around the same ammount of non-humans every month (correct me if I'm wrong).
