Knowing Your Neighbors On a Web Server

Before moving to a new web host, one of the factors that should be considered is the amount and kind of websites being hosted on your shared server. Some providers try to stuff as many customers as they possibly can into the same server to cut costs.

That became especially noticeable in the last few years; the trend of these companies is to promise enormous amounts of disk space and bandwidth at very low prices. These companies can make such offers since most users have low demands or inactive accounts, as long as the average is not significantly affected,  it doesn't matter to the ISP.

While web space and bandwidth are usually not an issue, CPU and virtual memory are shared between all the users of the same server. Users tend to consume large amounts of these resources due to inefficient scripting, many calls to databases or just having busy dynamic web sites. Many companies allocate hundreds or even thousands of accounts on one server will probably produce a very slow server, degraded performance and even downtimes.

The companies have a clever way to deal with that problem. They limit resources most users don't care to compare when looking for a web host. Usually, they will limit the CPU usage (these details can be found on the companies Terms and Conditions pages you sign before signup). That leads to frequent suspension of accounts for "exceeding resources" or a breach of the terms and conditions of the host, or worse – very slow servers where users are allowed to do what ever they like.

In addition to the number of hosted websites per server it is also important to know which sites are shared with you the same IP address. Sites with illegal content, spam sites and even adult or casino sites might get your site listed on a black list which might reduce traffic and even block your email in some cases. So it is also important to know WHO is sharing the server with you.

Solution: well, there is no perfect solution to this problem. The only ones who can tell you how many sites are being hosted on your machine are the ones with the interest to hide it from you: the web hosting companies.

But, a good solution will be to use a service called "Reverse IP" which returns the addresses of the websites that are using the same IP address as your site does – in most cases it the amount of sites per IP is equal to the amount of sites on a specific server. Also, the list of websites you get helps you to get to know with your new neighbors.

The HostPedia Project just announced its new tool for reverse ip lookup which also works with international TLDs. Enjoy.