Webhosting is very competitive nowadays and it can cost as cheap as US$13 per year for a beginner shared hosting package which allows you to host up to 1000 accounts but is limited to very little data transfer, CPU, memory, disk space consumption. If you go over the limits, all your websites under the same account will get suspended until you upgrade to a higher package or wait until the the limit gets reset on the 1st of the month. To cover the cost, some webhosting companies oversells by hosting hundreds or probably thousands of websites under one server. Overselling basically means to sell beyond the means of delivery and this can affect the performance and stability of all the websites hosted under that same server. Unfortunately only the webhost knows the exact number of websites hosted under their servers and probably wouldn’t let you know if you ask them nicely.
One way you can determine how many websites are hosted under the server is by running a reverse IP lookup search or some people calls it “IP Neighbor”. Most of the time a single IP address is also shared to host multiple websites on a shared hosting. There are a lot of free reverse IP lookup services on the Internet and I find that the reverse IP lookup service offered by DomainTZ offers one of the most accurate results.
Some reverse IP lookup services shows very little or outdated results. As for DomainTZ, the results are up to date (meaning that the IP address of the website that no longer points to the one that you searched for is removed) and most of the time it has the most listings if compared to competitors. There were a couple of times when I got more results on DomainTools Reverse IP Lookup but some of the domain no longer resolves to the IP address that I was searching for. If you give DomainTZ a try yourself, you will find that the results are generated really fast unlike some that can take up to a few minutes!
Let’s take one of our friend (ghacks.net) for a test. I entered ghacks.net at the “Enter a domain name or IP address” bar and hit the Enter key. In 2 seconds, DomainTZ shows 9 records of domain names hosted under the same IP address as ghacks.net.
You can click on the URL to open the website in a new tab and the whois link to view the domain whois information. A restriction that I found with DomainTZ is it only lists top level domains but doesn’t list subdomains such as de.ghacks.net. When I reviewed DomainTZ two weeks ago, the service was still free and only a simple registration is required to unmask the asterisk from the results. However just last week they started to implement paid subscription to remove the * from the domain names :(
From DomainTZ, I was shocked to find out that a website largeatom.com is also using the same IP address as raymond.cc. After checking with my proxy provider, they explained that largeatom.com used to use the same IP address that is currently being used by raymond.cc but now they’ve shut down the website and didn’t update their A records which is why their domain name is still pointing to this IP address. From this case we also learn that not all domain names with the same IP address are necessarily hosted on the same server. Nevertheless, DomainTZ’s reverse IP lookup is still a very useful service to find out if a shared server is hosting way too many websites.
DomainTZ is Probably the Most Accurate Free Reverse IP Lookup Search is a post from: Raymond.CC Blog