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This will only work if you have a CPanel hosting account that allows you to set up additional domains. If you haven´t got one yet take a look at my cheap webhosting reviews.

When you register your domain make sure you point your domain to your hosting provider´s name servers. They will look something like this ns1.yourwebhost.com ; ns2.yourwebhost.com. You can find these in the knowledge base most of the time otherwise just ask support.

First, log into your CPanel account. Then under “domains” go to addon domains. You will see a form like this:

Under the heading CPanel tells you pretty much everything what you need to know. After you registered your domain and pointed your servers to your host just enter the domain name in the required field and enter a folder in the “new subdirectory folder” space. Use something inconspicuous like /24523yourdomain/ so nobody can just type it in with a random guess. The password is what you will use for your FTP client. Next disallow that addon domain folder through the robots.txt of your root domain. Otherwise crawlers will just treat it as a subfolder of your main domain. Fiinally email your hosting support and tell them that you´ve registered domain xyz and you pointed it to xyz addon folder so they can set up the SOA records. After this your new domain should resolve within 48-72 hours and you will be able to access your site from your browser.

This will work for all CPanel hosts in my cheap webhosting reviews.

Yahoo webhosting has announced a special 35% discount on their webhosting packages for customers who sign up in April. If you sign up through the links above you will get my special coupon discount of 35%. Yahoo waived their setup fee of $25 and you also get the first 2 months of hosting for $7.77 instead of the normal $11.95.

The Yahoo starter plan comes with a free domain name, 5 GB storage, 200 GB transfer, 200 email addresses and supports the industry leading scripting and database tools PHP, Perl and MySQL.

If you´re interested in this offer make sure you sign up soon as the offer will expire on April 30th.

If you host more than one domain on one account your hotlinking protection on the main domain can become a problem with your addon domains. The hotlink protected file types will not show up in your addon domains. I had this problem recently at bluehost and I am going to share how you can get round this problem.

First things first – how do you set up hotlinking protection. In CPanel click on the corresponding link and choose the site you want to enable it for. Next just add the excluded file types and you are done. This is the hotlinking protection for one domain but what if you have more than one domain on one account? Just enable it for all three. Doing this through CPanel can get messy so we go directly to the .htaccess in your httpdocs directory.

In there you will find code which will look something like this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://maindomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://maindomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.maindomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.maindomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|swf|dcr|png|bmp.*)$ http://www.nytimes.com/ [R,NC]

Now to take care of more than one addon domain just insert the following. In my case I set this up for two addon domains. By the way, yes I am redirecting hot link attempts to the NYTimes. After all bandwidth thieves should stay in touch with current affairs as well

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://maindomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://maindomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.maindomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.maindomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://addondomain1.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://addondomain1.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.addondomain1.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.addondomain1.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://addondomain2.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://addondomain2.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.addondomain2.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.addondomain2.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|swf|dcr|png|bmp.*)$ http://www.nytimes.com/ [R,NC]

So what’s the fuzz about? Well, as I stated before if you just install hotlinking on your top level domain then you won’t be able to use images on the addon domains beneath it unless you activate the hotlinking protection for them as well.

AWstats is one of the most advanced free web statistics scripts available. It is available for download but instead of downloading and installing it I would recommend to find a web hosting firm that offers AWstats pre-installed. It’s a Perl script after all and installation can be a bit fiddly for the inexperienced user.

The following hosting firms have AWStats pre-installed: Bluehost, Hostgator, Hostmonster, HostICan, Lunarpages, Powweb.

If you host more than one domain on an account you can switch AWStats on for every domain through the Stats Manager in CPanel. For those who want to take a shot at installing AWStats on their local server or web server there are a few good links here.

For the rest of you who are still reading, I will introduce you to the main features and the AWStats output.

Summary: The summary field summarizes the number of unique visitors, the ratio of unique visitors/number of visits, the total pages viewed, the pages/visitors ratio and bandwidth used. AwStats also distinguishes between your human traffic and non-human traffic. The number of unique visitors is the main indicator for the traffic of a website. From the ratio which compares unique visitors to total visits you can see whether or not visitors are returning. Everything above one is good and means your site manages to encourage visitors to revisit your site. Getting close to two is the holy grail. The pages to visitor ratio is a good indicator as to what extent your visitor browsed your site. Obviously, if a visitor browses an average of 10 pages per visit your site is more interesting to your visitors than one which only gets 1.5 pages per visitor.

Monthly History: This section provides a monthly overview of unique visitors, number of visits, pages, hits, and bandwidth. In the bottom row you can also see the totals for the year. The ratios are not provided but can be easily computed.

Days of month: Gives you a breakdown of the aforementioned statistics by day of the month. Usually, I don’t find this very insightful. Only extreme daily changes will show up and can be explained. If you get a high traffic link, your server goes down etc.

Days of week: This section provides an overview of the average activity on each week day. The results may be slightly distorted as not every month is divisible by 7 and most of the time some days may occur more often than others. The activity can be useful for you to see when to announce a new feature (highest activity) or to schedule maintenance (during lower activity/server load).

Hours: Provides an overview of the average activity during the hours of the day. Again this is useful for technical staff for scheduling jobs on your site. Days of week and hours are both important to monitor the success of your marketing activities.

Countries: Shows you what countries your visitors are from. Be weary of visitors that don’t visit very often but use excessive bandwidth, and view a lot of pages. Those “visitors” may actually be malicious bots that steal content or perform other unwanted activities.

Hosts: A breakdown of your most frequent visitors by I.P. address. If you find something suspicious you can do an I.P. lookup which won’t be necessarily insightful but you can at least find out where their ISP is located.

Robots/Spiders visitors (Top 25): Spiders that visit your websites will show up here. The traffic is counted by hits (before the plus) and successful hits on robots.txt (after the “+” sign).

Visits duration: How long are you visitors staying on your site? The longer the better.

Files type: What files types where requested most? Could urge you to use smaller file if you’re using too much bandwidth. It may also indicate if someone is hot linking to your site.

Pages-URL (Top 25): Which ones of your pages are most frequently visited. The top rank is usually occupied by your home page. This section also provides the number of entries or exits of a particular page. If you have a high number of exits as a percentage of entries than the page in question is not doing a very good job at retaining your visitors and may need some extra attention.

Operating Systems (Top 10): A detailed analysis of the different operating systems used by your visitors. This can be used in conjunction with the browser report in order to optimize your site design.

Browsers: A list of the browsers used by visitors to access your site.

Connect to site from: This is one of my favourite reports within AwStats. First you can see what percentage of your visitors accessed your site through direct type in or bookmark. You can also see whether you have incoming links from search engines and other websites. The columns show you the hits and pages generated by these incoming links and what their percentage is based of the total of hits and pages.

Search Keyphrases and Keywords: The keyphrase would be a google search for “Cuban cigars” and the keywords are “Cuban” and “cigars”. This is a very helpful feature to assess how well you rank for certain keywords in the search engines. Compare this to the “links from search engines” to get an idea which search engines are providing your traffic.

Miscellaneous: Monitors whether your user’s browsers support certain media types. Although this is useful my columns always stay empty even though I’m pretty sure that a lot of my visitors have .pdf enabled for instance. So either my AwStats is not properly configured with regards to this section or something else is wrong here. Another very useful metric to gauge your site’s appeal to your visitors is the “Add to favourites estimated” which measures how many visitors out of the total bookmarked your site. This is a key retention indicator as this will most likely bring in repeat visits and help you build a solid and steadily growing traffic base.

HTTP Error codes: Here you can check what errors are occurring on your server and start to fix them. 404s are listed by URL so you can easily achieve zero 404s from your indexed or internal links. If someone performs false type ins then that’s beyond you of course. I also like to monitor if all of my 301 permanent redirects are working. For particular 301s you would use a redirection check tool but it’s nice to get a feeling for how often these redirects are taking place on your site.

By now you will have probably realised that Awstats is one of the best free stats tools available. If you go through the hassle of plugging some of the data into an excel sheet you can produce some really insightful graphs and get a really detailed understanding of what is taking place on your site and in your linking neighbourhood.

If you liked this post, here´s the link:
AwStats hosting