Find out what other sites are on your shared web host

First published on August 12, 2007

I’ve always been curious as to what other sites are hosted on my budget host. Because I use shared hosting instead of dedicated hosting, the responsiveness of my website and the health of the server it sits on also depends on what other sites are on the server. In addition to theblog.ca, there are probably hundreds of sites stored on one server.

I discovered myIPneighbors.com, which somehow — I don’t know what database it looks up — generates a list of what other sites are hosted on a particular website’s server. For example, if you type in “facebook.com”, you’ll see that only Facebook sites are on the same server (logical since it’s currently ranked somewhere around #6 on the list of most visited websites in the USA). But type in my site or another small blog and you’ll see that a whole ton of weird and wacky sites are listed.

You can use this information to assess whether a prospective or current host might be cramming too many sites onto one server, or to find out whether you’re on the same server as a porn site or a similar sketchy operation (screaming moral or security issues).

One tip, though — if you’re trying to assess prospective web host, you should type in the address of one of its client sites, and not the web host’s site itself. Often, web hosts will host their own website on a different, more reliable server in order to make themselves out to be better than they really are.

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