Just What Kind of Neighborhood is This?
I don’t know about you, but I like keeping my internet neighborhood clean. My Twitter account doesn’t have many followers yet, but I have blocked a few from following just because they are only there to promote a link to sex sites. Just like in the offline world, the company you keep has an influence on the relationships you can build.
My website host’s forum is one of my favorite places online. You not only get lots of help on items specific to hosting there, but plenty of ideas and links to check out. And the folks there are really supportive.
I try to get over there just to check out what’s happening as often as I can. Last week a post caught my eye, the poster had found a reverse dns tool that can show you the other sites are using the same IP number as yours:
http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/web-sites-on-web-server/
That is, if your website is on a shared hosting account. Which is most of us. Shared hosting is the least expensive, and until your site gets so big or busy that you need to move to a dedicated server, shared hosting is the way to go.
What it means is that your site along with many others is using the same IP on a shared server. That in itself is not a problem, depending on the content of the other sites. You might think it doesn’t matter what the content is of other sites on your server. You don’t link to them or have anything to do with them.
What you do have in common, by no choice of your own, is the IP address. And blocking by IP address is one of the easiest things to implement. I can block an IP address from posting comments on this blog. Any web site owner can block IP addresses from their control panel. The big one is ISP’s who will prevent large numbers of potential viewers from accessing any sites on an IP that they block, because they view the “bad apple” in the IP bunch to be potentially harmful.
There is something you can do about it. Request a “unique” or “private” IP from your website host. Most hosting providers will provide this for a nominal monthly fee. If you are serious about building your internet presence it is a small price to pay.
At JEDsWEB Hosting Services I am providing IP address protection at no charge:
This is being done as an additional service at no charge to our customers to help prevent IP blocking or blacklisting as a result of being on the same IP as “questionable” sites. All future hosting accounts will also be on this new IP.
You can see the announcement here .
There are plenty of places to check who is in your neighborhood. Google it or use the one above.
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_blocking
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/smallbusiness/store/risk/risk-17.html
http://www.google.com/search?q=IP+blocking
-JEDs
Tags: Blacklisting, dns, hosting, IP Blocking, reverse dns, Twitter
Categories:
Web sites
