I hope you don’t mind me cramming all these questions into one post. My biggest concerns are with folder permissions and log files since those are the issues I’ve had with other hosts in the past. But for $5/mo, I’m flexible. And everything I see going on here looks great. I’m glad you are so straightforward with your answers. Q1 – (Support) There are no phone numbers. Is all sales and tech support handled completely online? Although this sounds appealing, it’s a little scary since most hosting companies take a long time to reply if ever. Do you have details on how this works? Q2 – (Folders) Can you give me a snapshot of the folder structure I get when I get a new account? What folders are in my webroot? And can I make folders outside of webroot? Q3 – (Folders) I like your control panel but I wasn’t able to get to a place from which I can set folder permissions. Can you give me a snapshot of that and a description of how it works? Q4 – (Logs) Where do you put my log files in the folder structure? Q5 – (Logs) What structure are the log files in, W3C? Q6 – (Logs) Can I choose which fields get listed in the log files? If not, what is the list of fields? Q7 – (Logs) How long does a log file remain available in its UNCOMPRESSED format?
True that our primary method of communication is through our help desk ticket system but from our experience this has proven to be the most efficient way of handling questions asked by our customers. With phone support you have one staff member troubleshooting your issue, and if it cannot be resolved you wait online until you reach the next tier support. With the ticket system tier 1 and tier 2 level support, and our systems administrator can all look at the ticket and troubleshoot it at the same time. So basically you get more brain power all roled into one. We are a growing company and we try to maintain a quick resolution time to the issues brought forth, but at this time we do reserve the right for a 24 hour response time to your inquiry. This is not to say that we do not have anyone monitoring the servers 24/7. If there are any server wide disruptions we act upon it immediately. You can actually see this through your FTP. Once your site is process you can access the server via FTP. Even if you have not registered the domain name, you can still use the secondary FTP address to access your root. Basically all new sites will have no files or folders except of course or default Winhost welcome page. We figured this is better then simply allowing a new account to be pulled without any pages on it. But you are free to change it as soon as the account has been provisioned. You will basically have two users when the account is setup. One is the ASPNet IUSR. This is the user IIS will use to authenticate any ASPNet calls to the server. The permission for this user has full Read/Write access to the root and to what ever files or folders you upload to the root. The second user is the site FTP user. This is the primary FTP user name you will use to upload your files to our server. By default this user also has full read and write permission to the root and all contents within it. Depending on the plan you have you will get the option to create additional FTP user. For the Basic plan you can create 4 additional users and for the Max plan you can add 9. When you create these users in your Site Info Manager page of your Winhost control panel (CP) you can assign the appropriate permission on them. I am assuming you are referring to your http log. You will first need to enable your Raw logs, and this is achieved within your Site Info Manager of the CP. Once enable you will need to allow 24 hrs to pass. Then you can retrieve them using FTP. They will be in a hidden folder named httplog so you will need to manually navigate to the folder. You may want to read this kb article concerning your Raw logs. http://support.Winhost.com/KB/a715/how-to-accessdownload-the-raw-log-files.aspx Not sure on what you mean by W3C, but the raw logs is the standard HTTP logs that IIS generates for each web service. No you can't. But I think what you are looking for is a web analyzing tool. We offer free web analyzing tool to all our customers. We use the product SmarterStats that can track just how busy your site is and what parts of your site are getting the most activity. Try looking at these links. http://support.Winhost.com/KB/a600/do-you-provide-web-traffic-stats.aspx http://www.smartertools.com/SmarterStats/Features/Web-Log-Analytics-Website-Statistics.aspx All raw logs that you can download from your root are all compressed to save space on the server, and you can keep 30 days worth of raw logs on your root until our system cycles through them. You are encourage to download them so you can keep your own historical records.
Thanks Ray! Q2 followup - Can I make folders outside of webroot? In other words, when I log in through FTP, will I see a webroot folder? I want to create a data folder outside of webroot. Q3 followup - I want to be sure I understand. I'm not asking about FTP users. Sometimes when I visit my own site, I want to go to pages nobody else can see. So I remove anonimus visitors from that folder. I'd like to see how that is done from your control panel. Q4 followup I should explain. I have code that reads in the HTTP logs as people are visiting my site so that stats are produced in real time. So I want my site to have access to the logs. Is that possible? Q5 followup In IIS, you can choose the format of the log file. One is the "W3C Extended Log File Format". I don't recall the other but it might be NCSA. Some hosts choose the other format for the stat package they use. Can you find out what format you use? Q6 followup I'm not looking for an analyzer. I have my own. Can you list the fields that are in your HTTP log files? There's a header at the top of each file. Q7 followup Is there any chance you can avoid zipping my log files?
No. You cannot make folder outside of the web root. With IIS 7, you do this through changing the authorization rule in your web.config. Unfortunately, no. This is generally not a good idea because log files are usually opened by IIS. If you want to provide this kind of real time logging, you may want to consider logging into a database. It is w3c. We log all available items. ie. all fields are logged. No.
What kind of stats are you trying to produce? Its very easy to make a simple user counter in ASP. Then getting it to write some data to a log shouldn't be too difficult.
