Web Marketing Strategy Update

I’ve been using the free Awstats web analytics software for years on many of my domains (I use Google Analytics on some as well now, but the advantage of Awstats is its single page format, giving instant access to the data without lot’s of clicking about).

The other day, I decided my Awstats installation was overdue an update and popped over to SourceForge to pick up the latest version.

While I was looking over the docs to refresh my memory on the upgrade process, I came across a link to a page of Awstats ExtraSection examples on another website.

Awstats ExtraSections enable you to create your own special reports not provided by default with AWStats. I personally only started putting them in my domain configuration files a few years ago, and then only as a means of tracking clicks on exit and redirect links, etc.

It seemed much easier than having separate scripts to track clicks on my affiliate links, for example.

The AWStats Enhancements and Extensions page covers quite a bit more than that though, and provides copy and paste examples of the code to add.

According to Amazon.com, its latest product, Amazon S3 (which stands for Simple Storage Service) is a “reliable, highly scalable, low-latency data storage service.”

Originally designed to support both Amazon’s own websites and users of the AWS (Amazon Web Services) platform, the service is targeted at developers of web applications and services.

Amazon say the idea is to pass on the benefits of scale Amazon has to independent developers, so that storing 1 GB of data only costs 15 cents a month, and transferring data in and out of the system costs 20 cents per GB.

• Uses standards-based REST and SOAP interfaces designed to work with any Internet-development toolkit.
• Built to be flexible so that protocol or functional layers can easily be added. Default download protocol is HTTP. A BitTorrent (TM) protocol interface is provided to lower costs for high-scale distribution. Additional interfaces will be added in the future.

If you’ve not fully grasped what this means, Amazon S3 enables you to set up web businesses that involve the storage and manipulation of large amounts of data without the usual cost and reliability concerns.

Cheap, secure storage on tap.