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Managing Virtual Domains
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Figure 6. The Virutal Domains report
allows you to see which sites use the most bandwidth. |
When you are running a server with many web sites or virtual domains on it,
you will want to know relative usage of each site for billing and balancing.
Using web analytics, you can analyze the log files of all your web sites and
compare statistics of each. A Virtual Domains
report, like Figure 6, allows you to instantly see which domains are
logging the largest number of hits and bytes.
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In order to produce this report, you will need to make sure Summary has logs
from all your web sites. If each web site makes its own log files, you can
place them in subdirectories of the summary logs folder that correspond to
each site. See the Summary documentation
for more details on configuring Summary for use with virtual domains.
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If you are concerned about bandwidth usage by your virtual domains or are
billing each web site client for usage, you can sort the report by the Bytes
column to get the largest users at the top. If you have several web servers
located on different Internet connections (perhaps in different co-location
facilities) you can still analyze all the log files with a single copy of
Summary to determine which sites use the most bandwidth. Using this data, you
may want to evaluate the location of the sites to balance the load across your
Internet connections and keep your usage charges reasonable.
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| Figure 7. Use a
spreadsheet to track monthly bandwidth usage for client sites. |
The Virtual Domains report shows cumulative totals for the entire period
covered by the log files. So if you are billing by month and have more than the
current month’s log files, you will want to keep track of bandwidth usage of
each client site in a separate file or spreadsheet like Figure 7.
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| Figure 8. The Virutal Domains report
also shows Hits, which can correlate to server load. |
The Virtual Domains report also includes Hits information, as in Figure 8.
When you are managing several servers, even if they are all at the same
location, hits or requests tend to correspond more to server load than bytes
transferred. Again, if you analyze all the logs from all your sites in one copy
of Summary, you can use the Virtual Domains report to compare the request load
each site contributes to the server. Using this you can organize the sites
across the servers to better balance the load. As the Virtual Domains report
shows historical values, you may want to track the hits for each server in a
separate file or spreadsheet, as for the bandwidth above, to know how the sites
rank in hits for the recent period. Alternately, the Hits Over Time column
shows how each site loaded the server for the previous 30 days. Comparing these
charts may show which sites are consistently busy and which ones have periods of
relative inactivity versus bursts of high traffic.
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Suggested Bandwidth