Know your neighbors in shared hosting plan with MyIPneighbors

Sorry friends, MyIPneighbors.com does not work anymore.

MyIPneighbors is a Reverse IP Domain Check DNS Tool. To make things simple for you, MyIPneighbors actually lets you find all other neighboring websites hosted on your shared hosting server if you are using one. If you have a web site, odds are you’re probably using shared hosting. Shared web hosting service or virtual hosting service or derive host refers to a web hosting service where many websites reside on one web server connected to the Internet. Each site “sits” on its own partition, or section/place on the server to keep it separate from other sites. Shared hosting has both pros and cons. Shared hosting is generally the most economical option for hosting as many people share the overall cost of server maintenance. Shared web hosting also lets the hosting company make profits when giving away the hosting plans for very less money.

That’s about the pros of Shared Hosting, now let’s deal with the cons of Shared Hosting. Sometimes shared hosting can make your site slow depending on whom you’re sharing your site with. For example, if someone has a  really popular blog hosted on the same server as yours, chances are, it’s going to slow down the server. One other often faced scenario which is also one of the cons of shared hosting is when posts from other neighboring blogs appear on the first page of Digg, the server will surely become slow under that heavy load and sometimes unresponsive for everyone else being hosted on that server.

Check MyIPneighbors and find out who are sharing the same server with you. By giving MyIPneighbors your website’s address or IP address, you can not only find out how many other websites are being hosted on the same server as yours but you can also get the list of your neighbors.

I am using RadixHosting shared hosting plan. And from MyIPneighbors, I have found out that at the time I am writing this post, I am sharing the server with 378 other websites(ouch!). This number will probably grow in future as RadixHosting’s user base grows because they must be adding new sites uniformly on all the shared servers.

Look carefully after you know your neighbors from MyIPneighbors and check if there’s a popular website in the list. Also, if you’re having performance issues with your web site and you feel the server might be to blame, check out MyIPneighbors and assess for yourself if your web host is spreading it’s resources too thin. If your website is packed into a crowded host with thousands of other sites or there is questionable content being hosted side by side with your site, it may be time to look for a better host. Act fast before it’s too late !