awstats accurate or not?

[woopwoop]

I used to have this on an old site - I think awstats is still provided today on some hosting plans.

Anyways, I have a question for those familiar with this program about the stats below:

Day Number of visits Pages Hits Bandwidth
12 Jun 2008 550 1345 5648 69.29 MB
13 Jun 2008 601 1518 6436 78.64 MB
14 Jun 2008 539 1180 5303 61.34 MB
15 Jun 2008 549 1495 6578 77.16 MB
16 Jun 2008 618 1599 6783 80.81 MB
17 Jun 2008 50 110 471 5.17 MB
18 Jun 2008 0 0 0 0

This isn't my site so I can't just stick google analytics on there, but I'm interested in why their stats are showing this.

My problem is that as it turns to a new day (the bold date) I take a look at the stats and it shows the day before at 50 (or 65, or 48 etc.) The 18th being in bold and it being a new day looks like those stats are confirmed. Clearly the stats look like they have dropped 90% from the recent trend?

At first I was thinking that Google had dropped the site or something. When I check it a day later the 50-ish number has changed to 500-600 and the new day looks stuck on a low figure.

This is tricky to explain but I'm curious if awstats are notoriously bad at keeping stats in real time (or anything close to realtime). And how can stats be reported consistently at a firgure around 50 per day, then 24 hours later when it seems to be reporting for a new day, the figure jumps 900% to 500-ish?

If it's just that the stats are reconciled at a certain time a day later, then why is it showing the 50-ish visitors a an earlier time.

I'm also curious if these stats can be influenced in any way, either for bad purposes (to make a site look more popular - to help a sale) or skewed because of heavy spidering by SERPs?

Thx for any help

 

[meinthecorner]

AWStats are polled by the server generaly once every 24 hours, or when ever the host sets the cron job to. So if the job is run at 5am UK Time you'de get the 50 hits. Then 24 hours later it would poll again adding the stats from 5am to 23:59 as a completed day, then from 00:00 to 5:00am.

Some hosts have a button to press that repolls when ever you want, vidahost do.

 

[woopwoop]

Thanks for explaining that - I was starting to think that it was a process like that too. Just had to check as I might be buying this site. And hoped the traffic wasnt 50 a day and being hyped a little.

Thx