Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition

Maintenance Pages

Once you have an active web site, you — or your marketing people — will want to know as much as you can about who is using it, why they are, and what they think of the experience. Apache has comprehensive logging facilities, and you can write scripts to analyze them; alternatively, you can write scripts to accumulate data in your database as you go along. Either way, you do not want your business rivals finding their way to this sensitive information or monitoring your web traffic while you look at it, so you may want to use SSL to protect your access to your maintenance pages. These pages may well allow you to view, alter, and update confidential customer information: normal prudence and the demands of data protection laws would suggest you screen these activities with SSL.