DEVTRENCH.COM

The Secret to Finding Out What Sites are on Your Shared Host

Have you ever wondered who your neighbors are on your shared host? I wondered this for quite some time before I found this useful site that will tell you all of the host names that are on your server.

By using the Whois and Reverse IP service offered at whois.webhosting.info, you can find this out. Simply enter your domain name into the search box and click 'Go'. On the page that follows, either click on your ip address, or the link in the line that says "IP hosts n domains". This brings up an alphabetized and paginated list of domain names on your server. Some things to remember when using this resource:

It is not complete considering that it won't list domains on your server that have different IPs than yours. This would be any accounts that have been assigned a dedicated IP address.

It appears that it is not updated regularly. If you look at two domains that I own - ehlydesign.com and devtrench.com, you'll see that ehlydesign.com is listed under 75.126.144.70, and devtrench.com is listed under 69.56.171.57. Both IPs are actually wrong. Ehlydesign.com has since been assigned a static IP address, and the IP address that devtrench.com is listed under is old -- 2 months old.

So, while this might not be the most up-to-date picture of your current neighbors, it does paint a picture of who is/was on your server. I've spent hours on this site finding out interesting things about other famous sites. Just think of the sites that you frequent often...it can be pretty interesting to find out what other sites are on the same server as those.

Now if you can't tell already by reading this, I'm no DNS expert, but I get by in the trenches with what I can. If you are going to be a good web developer then a working knowledge of DNS is really helpful. I've found out most of what I know from the forums at Dathorn and Digital Point and just by doing tons of Google Searches. If you don't ask questions you'll never find out what you need to know (and that's the real secret). The End