Domain and host

Domains are the part of the web address that indicate the network visitors are connecting from. In the US the primary types include: .edu domains (educational institutions), .org domains (non-profits), and .com domains (corporate entities). There are also .net (networks), .mil (military organizations) and .gov (governmental organizations/agencies) domains.

There are also country domains. These range from fairly common (.uk and .ca) to quite obscure, for example, .tr (Turkey) and .er (Eritrea). It's interesting to see how far-flung your audience is. Note, however, that the presence of a country domain does not necessarily mean that the visitor is physically located in that country, just that he or she is connecting to the Internet via a server that is using that country's domain.

Host name indicates the specific computer visitors are coming from. The server uses a "lookup" process to determine the actual host name. If it isn't possible for the server to look up the name, the computer's IP address is logged instead. You'll see a lot of entries for computers on the BU network, such as:

it3-dhcp065.bu.edu

You can also see which search spiders have visited your site. For example:

crawl2.googlebot.com (Google search spider)
j3410.inktomi.com (Inktomi search spider)
crawler.singingfish.com (multimedia search spider)

You can see a list of search spiders.

The number of distinct hosts (which is reported on the Summary page) is often used as a measure of how many people have visited your site. This generalization should be taken with some caution, due to the problems of caching and dynamic hostnames. For example, some visitors will be accessing pages of your site from a cache server, which may assign the same host to different users with the result that multiple users are counted as a single visitor. At the same time, many networks assign IP addresses dynamically, so that a single visitor may be counted multiple times with multiple different addresses.