Forum Moderators: phranque
This is information I think every website owner would like to keep private.
Any suggestions?
thank you in advance
I would think that this would be a concern that people would protect.
I suppose I could get my host to disable stats. But I'm not sure if thats the best solution?
thanks
But if you're not, password-protect the stats directory. This may vary based on how your server is set up, but the most common is to use an .htaccess file with a require valid-user directive, do some searching around or contact your ISP.
But I second the motion that should trust your webmaster. I have access to all my clients' stats, and I use that information to make recommendations for improving their sites.
but what i think people are trying to say is, if he's designing the pages, and he's a good designer, then he needs to know what people are clicking on, and what they're not... where they are bailing out of the pages... their paths through the site... what browsers, platforms and resolutions they're using... etc. and all of these things will come from your stats. if you don't let him have access to some of these numbers then he's not going to be able to design the best site for you.
But what londrum said is valuable. Good designers -- the ones that build successful, usable, effective sites -- always hunger for as much information as they can get about what works, what doesn't, where the bottlenecks are, what visitors like and what they don't like. I wouldn't trust a web designer who didn't care about that type of information.
What you seem to want is like hiring someone to re-design your store, but withholding information about what products are the most popular, which aisles are the most crowded, which checkout lanes are the busiest, how many people need assistance reaching those items on the top shelf, and how easily wheelchairs can maneuver through the store. Yeah, you can get a store designed, but it probably won't be as successful as it could be.
I'm amazed how many sites don't have any security for stats pages. If I'm interested in a particular competitor's site, I'll try various combinations in the URL to see what, if anything, I can find. For example, www.somesite.com/awstats/cgi-bin.
I hire him for one thing: design.
Then he isn't a webmaster - he's a web designer. As previously pointed-out, there's no reason to give him access to cpanel.
He needs FTP (or, better SFTP - please don't use FTP, as it is insecure) access to the top-level HTML documents directory.
If he's a real webmaster, he needs access to the log files, and, if a VPS or dedicated server, access to a root login, or at least a login with permissions over the web server file directories.
How otherwise do you expect him to deal with "user x can't log-in", "user y got this error message" types of problems? Without the logs, it's impossible.
You could take away access to awstats, etc. but that wouldn't really be effective, as he could just copy the logs to his own machine and run whatever analysis he'd like on them.
