Bandwidth, Visitors and AWStats: understand traffic without overcounting people

Hosting reports describe server activity. Requests, page views, sessions and people are different measurements, and automated crawlers can account for substantial traffic.

Review a useful period

1. Select the affected domain and date range in the available report.
2. Compare bandwidth trends with page requests and frequently downloaded files.
3. Look for unusually large media, repeated missing URLs or traffic concentrated on expensive application routes.
4. Compare the period with marketing campaigns, backups, bots and external embedding.
5. Confirm an apparent problem in access logs or application monitoring before changing the site.

Read the boundaries

CDN-served traffic may not appear in origin reports in the same way as direct requests. Different tools apply different bot and visit rules. Do not report a raw request count as verified unique customers.

Use appropriately sized media, browser caching and efficient page delivery for legitimate traffic. Investigate abuse with support rather than indiscriminately blocking search engines or entire regions. Keep exported logs private because they can contain personal data. When a monthly allowance is involved, ask which services count toward it and how often the dashboard refreshes; the visible graph may not update instantly.