jonlee.ca

Many websites on the internet are hosted on some type of shared hosting. Shared hosting means your site is hosted on a server alongside other sites, in essence, you’re sharing the same server. Do you know who you’re sharing your hosting with?

Why does it matter?
On a shared hosting server, your resources are shared amongst sites on the same server so if you experience major slowdowns or constant server crashes, it might be one of your fellow webmasters that is to blame! I mean, who’d want to be hosted beside a very high traffic site or a very resource hungry unoptimized site right?

Also, there could be some legal concerns if there is inappropriate content hosted alongside your site on the same server. It’s best to be on the safe side and alert your web host of any suspicious activity from your server before things get worse!

How to Check Who’s Sharing Your Shared Hosting
To see who you’re sharing your website with, you could ask your web host, or if you have SSH access, you can perhaps check to see what domains exist on the same server (if you have permission and depending on your host’s configuration).

An easier way however, is to use a web service such as MyIPNeighbors. It will find other sites that share the same IP address as you. This indicates sites that are possibly hosted on the same server, but keep in mind that it isn’t exactly accurate since a single server could potentially have more than one IP address or many servers can share one IP address. Nameservers can also be set to direct to a specific IP as well.

Also, the data isn’t real-time since it reads from a database and I’m not sure how often it is updated. For a more up-to-date method, you can use Microsoft Live! Search with the IP: operator to find webpages that have the same IP address. For example,

ip: 65.91.249.193

will find pages with the listed IP of 65.91.249.193 but not necessarily all of them.

Looking Up Myself
Looking up myself on MyIpNeighbors reveals that there are 105 sites that share my IP address. But as I said before, this doesn’t necessarily translate to 105 sites sharing my server. When I saw this number at first I was quite shocked so I contacted mediatemple’s support and inquired as to how IP addresses are assigned on the Grid Server. Here was the response I got:

The Grid uses name based hosting and not IP based hosting. So yes, in essence, you may be sharing a single IP with other sites. However, this doesn’t mean that your website is not utilizing other nodes. Other customers on the Grid will be sharing different nodes at any given time depending on where the load balancer directs a request to.

So that cleared it up for me — I’m not sharing a server with 105 other sites! Nice!

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2007 at 11:24 pm and is filed under How-to, Site stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.