I use some scripts to gain information about the site statisics. The first one is Shaun Inman’s Shortstat, and the second one is refer script by Textism. About the first, Thalia mentioned something about the database rows. Yes, you’re right Thalia. Well, this is how I use those scripts.

Easy-to-read statistics

Shaun Inman’s Shortstats gives me something easy to read. And, it is quite complete. I can have these information: total hits, unique visitors, browsers, referers, search strings, and visitors’ country origins. When I write this, there are thousands of rows in my statistics table.

The same thing with Textism refer script. Just like its name, I use this to gain list of referers, how people come to my site. The difference is that I can have the visitors’ IP addresses, and the website URL (origin). When I find some stupid referers (read it as: potentially spammers), I put the information (IP address, query strings, and badwords) in my .htaccess file. I have lots of line in my .htaccess. For example, I found visitors come from stupiddomain.com/with/stupid/folder/, I put RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www.)?.*(-|.)stupid(-|.).*$ (Note: this is only part of my .htaccess file, I have many variations for this.)

Clean it up regularly

I do not keep the information forever. Every month, I clean up the statistics table. Both Shortstat and Refer have a simple mechanism to reset the database. A simple process. :)

Why not keeping the information?

The simplest answer for this is that I — probably most of you — have a bundled statistics in my web hosting control panel. :)