My portfolio site ran on vibes for too long, so this weekend project was: read the cPanel raw access logs (they're just gzipped files sitting in your hosting account) and render a dashboard. Zero dependencies, zero tracking JS, zero monthly bill. Two bugs that almost sank it: filesize() on a .gz file returns the COMPRESSED size. I was slicing my decompressed log buffer by it, which silently chopped the newest lines off the data. The dashboard wasn't broken - it was confidently wrong about today, which is worse. Shared hosting puts OTHER sites' logs in the same directory. My referrer charts had domains I've never touched in my life until I filtered by path. Favorite finding so far: a link community that sends me real readers shows up as ZERO referrers, because in-app browsers strip the referrer header. If your traffic comes from apps, your analytics is undercounting it completely. It's live on my site now, and I open-sourced the deploy pattern behind it too. Happy to share details - what would you check first in raw logs?   submitted by   /u/EmergencyIsland4574 [link]   [comments]