Plesk stats or Google Analytics?

[JH_]

I've been using google analytics for my website traffic analysis (simple enough setup, involves placing a few lines of javascript on each page)

So does this mean that I can stop the Plesk statistics job from running now?

C:\SWSoft\Plesk\admin\bin\statistics.exe

As I understand it, the statistics.exe collects all the info from the http log for the day and collates it into some kind of database. But since I'm using Google Analytics, I can save some memory by disabling the stats job - I think it's been maxing out my memory at 2.30am every night anyway.

Could you confirm that it's 'safe' to disable the stats job? (i.e. it's not doing some other behind-the-scenes stuff I'm not aware of)

[blacknight]

I *suspect* that it's also doing bandwidth tallies etc., as well, so disabling it might not be advisable.

I'll see if one of our technical team knows more about it

[Joseph]

I can't seem to get plesk stats to record any stats, its enabled and everything but its never recorded any stats

Is there a walkthrough guide for this I could run through to make sure I've setup everything correctly?

Cheers

[joes]

JH -

Very briefly on this you probably need both.

Google Analytics is focused on counting visitors (that is people really!). It will only work if Javascript is enabled which usually means only browsers. AWStats (and other backend stats packages) are really more to do with counting hits and traffic. So although they don't give as accurate a visitor count and/or sophisticated reports on your users behaviour it will allow you to see other useful information not found in Google analytics such as the last time you were spidered, the bandwidth usage, 404 errors etc. We have an (old) but still maybe pertinent article on it here Lies, Damned Lies and Web Statistics » Aonach Consulting if it is any use to you.

Cheers

Joseph