Have you ever had drastically different visitor stats after changing hosts?
 

I'm a little perplexed.

Moved about 20 blogs to a new host, and the daily visitors numbers reported in awstats has dropped by about 2/3 for some of the sites.

Are there different ways to configure awstats that would cause this much difference in the reporting?


If it matters, awstats was installed using this plugin http://www.directadmin.com/features.php?id=894

On the old server, it was installed by the server techs on a domain by domain basis.

If anyone can shed some light on this I'd appreciate it.

Boommarked, i feel this will be interesting.

Stats from old server
http://www.amateurcleavage.com/gfy/awstats1.jpg

Stats from new server
http://www.amateurcleavage.com/gfy/awstats2.jpg

perplexing

put on a 3rd party stat reports like stat counter and see if there is any difference in the 2

Maybe all of the DNS haven't updated yet, give it another day.

I'd thought of that....but these are wordpress blogs, and there are a shitload of big pics on html pages that reside outside of the blog directory......so there's no easy way to use a 3rd party counter....that's why I rely on server stats.

No doubt about it that speed dramatically affects total traffic. That would apply to name serving, how fast your page loads in addition to navigation through your site.

When you change hosts, the idea is to get better as in more traffic.

That's one issue, but to be fair the stats program would have to be the same and installed in the same way.

Many things can slow ya down too. Ya have an iframe or script hosted at a sponsor site? That sure can slow down a load. There are some programing techniques to minimize that. Study table html.....

Anyways, good luck and hope things get better.

Has nothing to so wit awstats, someone is hijacking your traffic

If you moved from a host with slow bw like cogent or nlayer you may see a 18-25% drop is traffic, thus less revenue. I recently had a back end media server at alpha red, I moved it to a good host that uses level3 and savis and it was like crazy my sales and traffic went up approx 20%. I couldn't believe it so I've talked to a few others and the same thing happened to them. I'm now convinced that I may really have been wasting money rather then saving by using a low end host. Oh well you live, you lose, then you learn.:pimp

Sounds like your new host is slow, maybe they use low end bandwidth, slow servers, network gear, or a number of other things. As askmomma said above I have seen and heard of this same issue happening when you go to low quality hosting. The real proof will be when your revenue drops, then you will see the real deal, and start moving again if it's not to late.:2 cents::2 cents:

Good Luck Mate:helpme

where does your traffic come from? google serps? google might have fucked you somewhat due to the change :2 cents:

Would it happen instantly just from changing the IP of the site?

The answer to that is most likely NO. Unless you get HUGE se traffic you wouldnt even notice the drop in se traffic.:2 cents:

FWIW, this isn't "cheap hosting"

I'm seeing mostly Level3 on outbound traceroutes, the load is 0.04 right now, and I haven't seen it go above 0.5, there's memory available and CPU usage is low.

I'm basically just wondering about the awstats configuration...if that might have something to do with it.

The level3 is good, it's what you don't see thats bad...:winkwink:

Good Luck

Something else I just thought of.

On the last box awstats updated every 3 hours, on this box it's once per day.

I wonder if it's possible that the data was overreported on the last server (i.e. counting the same visitor several times by not deleting the logs after processing them)

I believe AWStats uses time stamps when creating data files so this is unlikely.

maybe spend some quaity time at http://www.traceroute.org/

I have, but I was moving off of WebAir shared at the time. :thumbsup

Your log files may have rotated by the time awstats ran. Try running awstats every hour and see if there's a difference.

i would like to see more detailed stats

like total uniques from certain sorces such as google yahoo etc etc b4 and after
total unique ip's b4 and after
etc etc
your old aw stats could be configured differently and the new one could be configed different

same here, moved a few sites from alphared to exmasters and my traffic went up about 20%, sites load much faster, sales satyed the same though - close to $0 per day ;)

A 2/3rd drop obviously is a configuration issue, or you would almost assuredly notice something is wrong just from viewing the site itself/overall bandwidth usage.

Many folks move from providers to us, and see a 10-20% gain in traffic - half due to simply servers being setup properly, half due to better bandwidth quality. However, a 66% gain (or drop) would be pretty unrealistic.

Maybe he should have moved to you then, because it sounds like it's for sure a shitty host (bandwidth) connection. I have used awstats for years on several different servers on several different hosts and not once was their any issue. Id vote for it being a slow cogent/nlayer issue over an awstats deal.:2 cents::2 cents: Like was mentioned above wait until your revenue drops then you will know its not just the stats reporting error.:2 cents::helpme

Could be a few reasons.
Give it time, some visitors is probably still going to the old server.

Google didn't like the new IP and decided to deindex some pages?

Server IP may be blocked on some big ISPs?

Perhaps the IP's that you are now on...with the new host....were black listed at some point in the past.

you probably need wp-super-cache

When you change hosts, Google notices and re evaluates your site. I know this trick, as I host about 48,000 websites.

i'm sure his sites will be back soon on search engines...

Thanks for your replies. I'm going to have to look into the configuration.

Again, this is not cheap cogent type hosting.

Even if the hardware was subpar (which it isn't) there's barely any load on it, and traceroutes out from the server go through mostly level3.

I'm not going to name the host here because I don't want people associating my problem with them. This isn't their fault, I specifically asked them to install this module so we wouldn't have to install stats on a domain by domain basis.....although it looks like that's what I may have to do.

I would for sure at least try installing it on one local domain to see if the problem goes away.

I assume the host would check this, but maybe all the logs aren't turned on or something deletes the log files so you are only getting part of the logs.