How do I interpret hosting control panel access logs?

Access logs record every request made to your website. They show who visited, what pages they loaded, when, and from what browser. Here is how to read them and where to find them.

01. Log Format

Each line in the access log looks like:

192.168.1.1 - - [26/Mar/2026:10:15:30 -0700] "GET /page.html HTTP/1.1" 200 4523 "https://google.com" "Mozilla/5.0..."

• 192.168.1.1 - Visitor's IP address
• [26/Mar/2026:10:15:30] - Date and time of the request
• "GET /page.html" - The page or file requested
• 200 - HTTP status code (200 = success, 404 = not found, 500 = server error)
• 4523 - Response size in bytes
• "https://google.com" - Referring URL (where the visitor came from)
• "Mozilla/5.0..." - Browser/user agent string

02. Useful Things to Look For

• 404 errors - Find broken links: grep " 404 " access-log
• Bot traffic - Search for "bot" or "crawler" in user agent strings
• Suspicious activity - Repeated requests to wp-login.php, xmlrpc.php, or admin pages
• Top pages - See which content is most popular

For error logs (PHP errors, server errors), check cPanel > Metrics > Errors. For website analytics, Google Analytics provides much richer visitor data than access logs.

Quick Recap

1. Raw Access logs in cPanel > Metrics
2. Awstats for visual analytics without raw log parsing
3. Each line = one request with IP, page, status, referrer
4. Grep for 404 to find broken links
5. Google Analytics for richer visitor insights

Server logs · Last updated March 2026 · Browse all Hosting CP articles