How to Update AwStats Manually

If your website resides on a shared hosting account, chances are AwStats is updated automatically at a frequency determined by your web hosting provider.

However, there are times when you may need to update your statistics manually, like when you’re running a PPC campaign for instance.

Here’s a quick and dirty trick that will allow you to perform a manual update of AwStats if your website is hosted on a cPanel server.

First, using your favorite FTP client, download the AwStats configuration file from your hosting account. This file is located in /tmp/awstats/awstats.[yourdomainname].conf

Next, edit the configuration file using a non-formatting text editor such as Notepad. Find the line that reads

AllowToUpdateStatsFromBrowser=0

and change it to

AllowToUpdateStatsFromBrowser=1

Save the file and upload it back to your web server, replacing the one already there.

Now login to cPanel and click the AwStats icon. You will now see an “Update Now” link at the top of the AwStats pages.

The downside is that this configuration will be overwritten each time the server performs an automatic update so you’ll have to modify it again and again.

Stay tuned as I will show you how to install your own copy of AwStats to make it accessible outside of cPanel.

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