cPanel includes several tools that show how much traffic your site uses and who is visiting. These help you spot unusual spikes, plan upgrades, and understand your audience.
Checking Bandwidth
- In cPanel, open Bandwidth under the Metrics section.
- The graphs show usage over the past day, week, month, and year.
- The breakdown lists how much each protocol used, such as HTTP and email.
Bandwidth measures the data transferred to and from your account. If you are close to your monthly limit, the sidebar on the main cPanel page also shows a usage bar.
Visitor Statistics
Two tools report on traffic:
- Visitors: shows the most recent individual requests, including the visitor IP, the page requested, and the response code. Useful for live debugging.
- Awstats: provides graphical monthly reports with visits, unique visitors, top pages, referrers, and search terms.
To open Awstats, click it under Metrics, then choose the domain to view.
Reading the Numbers
| Metric | What it tells you | |------------------|--------------------------------------------| | Unique visitors | Distinct people, counted once per period | | Visits | Sessions, which can repeat per person | | Hits | Every file requested, including images | | Bandwidth | Total data transferred |
Hits are always much higher than visitors because a single page loads many files.
When Usage Spikes
A sudden bandwidth jump can mean a popular page, a hotlinked image, or bot traffic. Check the Visitors log for repeated requests from one IP. For ongoing analytics, a tool like Google Analytics gives deeper insight than the built-in reports.