Website inaccessible due to abnormal traffic

Symptoms

A website hosted on a web hosting service becomes inaccessible after running for a period of time.

Cause

Abnormal traffic, such as excessive traffic, can make the website inaccessible.

Procedure

To resolve this issue, you need to analyze your website's access data to understand traffic trends and identify the specific cause of the failure. This guide demonstrates how to use the WebLog Expert tool to analyze website logs, using a website hosted on a Windows operating system as an example.

1. Download the website logs to your local computer.

   Website logs include the access log, error log, and archived log. For more information, see Download or delete website logs.

2. Merge all downloaded logs into a single .log file.

   This example uses a local computer running the Windows operating system.

   Note

   If your local computer runs Linux or macOS, refer to the relevant documentation for instructions on how to merge log files.

   1. Open Windows PowerShell.

   2. Run the type command to merge all log files into a logs.log file.

   type log?.log > logs.log

   After the command runs successfully, you can find the logs.log file in the log directory. Open the file to confirm that it contains the content from all log files.

3. Download and install the WebLog Expert tool.

   This example uses WebLog Expert version 9.53. The user interface may differ in other versions.

4. Analyze the website logs.

   Note

   The following example covers only a few common parameters and configurations. You can adjust them as needed.

   1. Start the WebLog Expert tool and click New. On the General page, configure the parameters, and then click Next.

   2. On the Log Files page, click Browse... next to the Path setting, select the merged logs.log file, and then click Next.

   3. On the Time Range page, keep the default settings and click Next.

   4. On the Tracking page, configure settings as needed and click Next. This page is empty by default.

   5. On the Filters page, configure settings as needed and click Next. This page is empty by default.

   6. On the Report page, set a path to save the report, and then click Finish.

   7. Right-click the analysis task you created (for example, Profile), and then click Analyze.

      After the analysis is complete, the software generates a report file in the Report folder by default. An example path is file:///C:/ProgramData/WebLog%20Expert/Report/index.htm.

5. View the analysis results.

   Open the analysis report in a browser. Click a parameter to view its results.

   The following table describes the common parameters.

   Parameter	Description
   General statistics	Provides a summary of your website's traffic.
   Activity statistics	Shows traffic activity over a specific period, such as by day or hour.
   Access statistics	Provides a detailed analysis of the access log, including requests for pages, images, and directories.
   Visitors	Provides statistics about visitor IP addresses.
   Referrers	Shows statistics on visitor referral sources.
   Browsers	Provides statistics on visitor browsers.
   Errors	Provides statistics on site errors.