Can Web Designer view who visited site?

Question

Just curious.....I was told that a person that has created a personal web site may view who visited it. Is this true?

Answer 1

If by "who" we're talking about IP addresses, then there are essentially two ways that information can be retrieved, depending on what features are available on the web hosting service in use...

1) Access the log files and look it up.

2) Use a scripting language like PHP to store the IP address, time of visit, etc, in a database.

Once the IP address is available, that can be used to look up the general location of the user.

However, to get more detailed information than that, the site owner would have to get in touch with your Internet Service Provider (ISP), and they are not likely to give out further information (like your name, address, etc) without a search warrant (because they don't want to get sued).

Also, an IP address alone is not really sufficient to identify a computer, unless you have a PERMANENT address. Many times, a users address might change multiple times even during one visit to a website, because the request is being routed through a proxy server (that's how AOL does things, for example).

Answer 2

If you are talking about a free personal web site like on geocities or google, you just get very basic access to this data and will have to pay for further access. With a site at a paid host you should always have access to the logs and may have a program that does basic analysis but anything else you will either have to pay extra for, install yourself, or both.

All the major web servers by can log all connections to the servers, and there are hundreds of programs out there that parse web server logs to extract meaningful information, like number of unique visitors, their IP address and OS, pages they visit and what site referred them.

I disagree strongly with DonM that only those with bad intentions would be interested in this data! Monitoring this data is essential to the health and success of a website. If you monitor this data you could see that someone has been attempting to hack your site before they succeed and block them, or spot a slashdotting or similar and install or modify traffic filters to prevent your website being taken down by it.

Answer 3

It depends on who, and how they developed the site, Most regular folks could care less, it is normally those with less than good intentions that are the ones that will want IP's and to distinguish what Operating Systems were used to view the site for Marketing reasons.
Generally speaking though this isn't done and would take software to do it, so NO, very rarely.
Don

Answer 4

It also depends upon your hosting company. I run three websites and I can retrieve how much traffic on each page, the ip's, download amounts, and several other areas.

IP's tell you very little about who the person is. You will have to go through the ISP to get personal information, and that is rarely given out without a court order.