Reverse IP Lookup: How Many Neighbors You Have?
March 18, 2008 by wavenumber
Just recently I changed web hosts. While doing my research to find a reliable company, one of the parameters I wanted to investigate was how many and what kind of sites were hosted on the same server.
Many companies try to stuff as many customers as they can into the same machine to save costs. This became specially noticeable in the last few years with the advent of the big “overseller” companies promising enormous amounts of disk space and bandwidth at impossible low prices. Everyone has seen those offerings: “1 TB disk space and unlimited bandwidth for just US$ 5 / month!”, etc. Their reasoning is that since most users have low demands or inactive accounts, it doesn’t make a difference to pack a truckload of them in the same space as long as the average is not significantly affected.
The problem is the server hosting their accounts still has a limited amount of CPU resources, and a finite amount of data that can be sent at any given time. With hundreds, or more commonly thousands, of accounts on a server, chances are high someone will be heavily using resources in your digital neighborhood. That translates into degraded performance to your connection or, even worse, increased downtime.
The big companies have an ingenious way to deal with that. They limit resources most users don’t care to compare when looking for a host. Typically, they will limit the CPU usage and with say 2,000 people using the same machine, you can bet your slice will not be that large. That leads to frequent suspension of accounts for “exceeding resources” on hosts with enforced quotas, or, worse, a service slow as a snail on hosts that let users run free.
The CPU example is just one of the many ways companies deal with the overcrowding, but the basic result is the same. You don’t get a chance to use what you thought it was such a good deal: all that disk space and bandwidth. (You probably didn’t need them in the first place.) Customer service is also diminished. Most commonly, it’s reduced to some automated forms or the standard excuses: “your script needs to be optimized,” “that’s an installed-software problem, not a hosting problem,” “we don’t have any downtime, that was just 1 box out of a thousand servers we run,” you get the idea.
Enough of that, the plan was to find some less crowded space with the resources I needed and good support. An easy way to check how many people share the same IP as you is to perform a reverse IP lookup. I must point out that’s not an exact way of knowing how many “neighbors” you have. Many sites on your box may have dedicated IP numbers and not show up, for instance. It’s just a way to have a quick and coarse idea how crowded your box is. Another use for it is to see what kind of sites share your IP number. That might be of concern depending what you host. The ChurchForMoralRectitude.net might not like having the DrunkenSlutBabesOfSpringBreak.tv showing up in the same listing, for instance.
There are a few online services offering reverse IP lookup and they can be found using any search engine. Here’s a couple of them that work for me: IP Neighbors, You Get Signal.
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