![awstats 6.4 awstats 6.4](https://static.oschina.net/uploads/logo/splunk_9PKVQ.png)
More than 100% higher number of visitors according to AWStats. There is a great data disparity between the two. Here are my top line stats for June in Plausible Analytics:Īnd here are my top line stats from AWStats: You can see my complete data for the month of June in this open dashboard. I didn’t publish any new content and I didn’t share any of my posts anywhere at all. I pretty much ignored my site in June to see what would happen. I also excluded things such as bandwidth consumed as that’s not measured by web analytics. This means that I excluded things such as the bounce rate and the visitor devices as those are not measured by AWStats. I compared all the data points that were measured by both tools. I installed the Plausible Analytics script on my site too (I’ve opened up my Plausible Analytics dashboard to the public and you can view it here), so I can now compare the complete stats for June 2020 between these two services.
![awstats 6.4 awstats 6.4](http://hermes.k-june.com/2005/10/awstats-robots.png)
I’m lucky to have access to the cPanel through my web hosting provider and cPanel has integration with AWStats. Netlify and Cloudflare are some of the examples. There are many other server-side analytics providers depending on where you host your site. With access to your server logs, you can feed the logs into server log analysis tools such as AWStats, Analog, GoAccess and Webalizer to get a dashboard with charts and graphs. To learn more about the differences in the data between these approaches, I’ve compared the data between Plausible Analytics as client-side analytics and AWStats as server-side analytics on my own website in June 2020. How big of a data gap is there between server log analysis and web analytics?
![awstats 6.4 awstats 6.4](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/exposesurawstats-k-140217203520-phpapp01/95/installation-et-configuration-dawstats-outils-danalyse-de-logs-sur-centos-64-17-638.jpg)
Let’s take a deeper look at the server logs vs JavaScript-based web analytics. And there is a lot of automated bot traffic on the internet.
![awstats 6.4 awstats 6.4](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/exposesurawstats-k-140217203520-phpapp01/95/installation-et-configuration-dawstats-outils-danalyse-de-logs-sur-centos-64-22-638.jpg)
With server log analysis, it is harder to filter out robots, crawlers, spiders and other non-visitors. But are these advantages worth the side effects? The main benefits of server-side analytics are that they have no impact on your page speed and the fact that adblockers cannot block server logs. Are server-side analytics a realistic alternative to client-side analytics for the average website?.How is Plausible Analytics different from the average client side analytics?.Are server logs more privacy-friendly than client-side analytics?.What are client and server-side analytics and how do they work?.How big of a data gap is there between server log analysis and web analytics?.What’s the difference between server logs such as AWStats and JavaScript-based web analytics such as Google Analytics? Are client side or server side analytics more accurate? And which should I use on my website? Let’s take a look.