Best log housekeeping and reporting practices at Verio?

[Randall]

I've had sites hosted at Verio for over 8 years, and recently converted a store to their ShopSite 2000 plan. Am very confused by the different way logs are kept on that plan. Who's using them successfully to generate meaningful reports?

On the old Verio Bronze plan, I'm used to downloading the compressed file containing a month of data, and running an old version of WebTrends Log Analyzer on them. The stores are relatively low traffic, so I need to exclude our own visits, maintenance, and spider hits, or they would seriously skew the numbers.

WebTrends can exclude lines based on a value in the Apache cookie field, but Verio doesn't support the field, so to to exclude those hits, I run a Word Macro on the uncompressed files (not sure I'd do it that way now, but it works pretty quick). The macro deletes those lines, then I run the report on that.

With the 2000 plan, that's all history.

Instead of one log file per month, there's a file for each day. Each day, they're all renamed, so that today's is always 0, yesterday is 1, before that is 2, etc. back through history. Rather than requiring me to archive them, Verio says they'll keep them forever, so that two years from now, the file for 9/16/2006 will be named something like 745.

That's just as well, because inside the compressed files, the actual file inside the .gz is always named the same. So, even if I wanted to uncompress the file each day, I would have to rename it.

The only practical method I can imagine for managing all this would be to download all the files for the past month, build script that concatonates them, archive that file, do my preprocessing on it, then run the report.

Verio says just to use their online Urchin reports. Urchin doesn't filter out those visits, it's not customizable, and I find it painfully slow. NOT an option, except maybe for keyphrases.

Apparently I'm the only person having a problem with the Verio setup. Can somebody describe a practical reporting methodology that will give reliable data?