I found out that I have about 600 neighbors. No, I don’t live in a major apartment building. I’m talking about the server that I host this site on.  Thanks to a post by Max at ZedoMax, I found a site called myIPneighbors.com. It’s a reverse IP domain lookup. Type in your domain and hit enter. Up comes a list of all the other domains that are hosted on the same domain. In other words, all the other domains that are being hosted on the same server!
When I punch in this domain, it comes up with 609. Some of those domains are mine (about 10), but the rest are not. So, what do you think happens when one of those domains gets dugg? Or when one of them suddenly becomes very popular because of the video that they posted on YouTube? Even if my site is getting exactly the same traffic as it did yesterday, it’s going to be exponentially slower. At the bottom of my old theme, I had the little doodad that would tell me (and you) how many queries were done to the database and how long it took to execute those. On the old theme, it was about 50 queries and usually less than 10 seconds. But on occasion, I saw it hit upwards of 45 and 50 seconds and on a few rare occasions, over 1 minute. Not because my site was seeing an above average load, but because someone else on the same server was.
I hadn’t really given it much though, because at this point, I don’t really want to shell out for a dedicated server. I figured it had to just be dealt with and go from there. Well, when I found this site, I got curious. This site is hosted on a shared server by GoDaddy. Another of my sites is hosted on 1&1 on a shared server. How many total sites are hosted on that sever compared to the 609 on the godaddy server? 13.
Maybe it’s time to switch around a little. Did I mention that with every account through 1&1 you get two free domains? You never pay for the domain or its renewal as long as you have the hosting account on 1&1. Of course, to take advantage of that, you have to have a hosting account, so you’ll be paying extra to get just the domains.
I also noticed another interesting use of myIPneighbors.com. If you want to know what some of your competitors are doing, look up their domain. If they have a dedicated server, then the resulting list is most likely the other sites that they are working on.
So, how many neighbors does your site have?
About Shane Ede
Interestingly, the myIPneighbors site is hosted at Dreamhost… the same place all of my sites are hosted, though they have 26 “neighbors”.
Out of 25 of the domains (and subdomains) on my shared account that I looked at, they are spread around on 15 different IPs, with totals ranging from 11 to 19 total sites sharing the same IP. Many of the other sites are “index of/” and placeholders, though.
I also realized that all of my mySQL files are running on their own IP, not shared with anybody else. Dreamhost uses subdomains on a separate machine for databases, rather than using “localhost” (which I knew), but I thought that others would still share the same IP.
Godaddy is the worst at 590 “hits” for the host where most of my domains are.
I have one over at 1&1, but its hard to tell as its a redirect and might not be reading correctly.