COUNTRIES AND LOCALES
(Investigator 230, 2026 September)
Traffic Statistics
The INVESTIGATOR NEWS sheet (No. 22) published in January (2026) listed the yearly "traffic" to the Investigator website:
The statistics module provided by the internet service provider
(Digital Pacific) does not use the term "Countries". Instead "Locales",
which dictionaries define as "A place or locality." What's
the difference?
Copilot – the artificial intelligence which Investigator utilizes — was asked:
"The UN has 193 sovereign member states with voting rights and two
non-member states. However, the c-Panel statistics section, when
listing the number of page views originating from different lands, uses
the term "Locales" which include more lands than the UN member states.
How many Locales does c-Panel recognize?"
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Copilot's Explanation
What "Locales" means in cPanel (AWStats)
In AWStats (the statistics engine used inside cPanel), Locales = countries detected from visitor IP addresses. This list is not capped at UN member states. It includes:
• UN member states
• Non member states • Territories • Dependencies • Special regions used in GeoIP databases • Occasionally pseudo codes (e.g., "Unknown," "Local network," "Satellite provider")
AWStats relies on MaxMind style GeoIP databases, which contain more
than 240–250 country/territory codes, far exceeding the UN's 193
sovereign states.
So how many "Locales" does cPanel recognize? AWStats itself does not publish an official total, because the number
depends on the GeoIP database version installed on the server.
However: • Modern GeoIP country databases typically contain 249–255 country/territory codes.
Thus, the practical answer is: cPanel recognizes ~250 possible locales,
but your AWStats report will only show the ones actually present in
your traffic logs.
GeoIP databases include:
• Territories (e.g., Guam, Puerto Rico, Hong Kong, Greenland)
• Special regions (e.g., EU, Asia-Pacific networks) • Non sovereign entities • Satellite/anonymous networks • Legacy or special-purpose codes This is why your cPanel "Locales" list is longer than the UN's 193 sovereign states. (https://copilot.microsoft.com 2026)
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In a nutshell, the traffic to websites can potentially come from about
250 locales which include the 193 UN member states.
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