This log provides details of actions performed with your publicly served folders. It is helpful for auditing who (Remote IP) is accessing the publicly served folders, when files were accessed, the hostname and path of the files accessed, and the status of each action.

We currently retain these logs for 30 days, but we are gradually increasing this to 180 days, with the 180-day retention expected to be in place by 2025.

Below are the details available in the public hosting logs.

Actions Logged

The Public Hosting logs record that someone has interacted with the public hosting web server to request a file, not whether someone has actually downloaded a file.

Status and Response Code

The Status of the public hosting logs indicates whether the requested path could be served to a visitor, and correlates with the Response Code. When the response code is 200, the requested folder or file path exists and was served to a public hosting visitor, so the status will indicate Success.

When you configure your publicly served folder to force users to download rather than displaying the contents of some files directly within the browser, the successful response code for a file path is 301 rather than 200.

The status is always Success when the request succeeds, even if the web visitor cancels the download or their connection is interrupted.

When a visitor requests a path that doesn't exist in a publicly served folder, the response code is 404 and the status is Failure.

A response code of 401 means the visitor did not supply the correct credentials for the public sharing folder, and the status is Failure.

Duration

The logging reflects a visitor requesting a file, so the duration will usually be extremely short (often less than 1 second), regardless of how long any subsequent file transfer takes.