Do you know what other websites are hosted on the same server as the one that is hosting your website? And why does this matter?
I saw a website yesterday that offered the usual range of website design services as well as web hosting.
Sounds straightforward enough, this is exactly what we do at Areoff. What alerted me though was that they also offer adult hosting. This then raises the question: “Is my florist’s website being hosted on the same server as an adult website? And why does this matter because surely if a visitors keys in your web address they will only ever find your website and not some dubious website advertising adult services and products?”.
I would be concerned if my website was hosted on a server that also contained adult website for two reasons. Firstly, search engines can detect the other websites that share the same IP address as yours i.e. hosted on the same server and if your website is in the same place as an adult website it may well pass over your website and not list in it’s listings because it sees the server as an ‘adult’ server. This would be detrimental to the success of your business online, even on the very basic level of users being also to find your web address when they do a search for your company.
The second danger is that due to an administration error on the part of the hosting company you could end up finding your web address going to an adult site which is obviously detrimental to your website and your business. A similar situation happened to a colleague of mine several years ago when he was using a shared server. The server crashed. The hosting company rebuilt the contents of the server and several websites went to the wrong web-pages due to human error. Fortunately, none were of an adult nature - but it’s a real possibility and mix-ups do happen.
So, it’s worth finding out if your website is being hosted alongside those of an adult nature. There are a number of websites than can tell you this and Whois is one example. Do a search on your domain name and as part of the listings you will see an entry for:
Reverse IP: xx other sites hosted on this server.
If you click on the link on ‘xx other sites’ you will get a list of websites that are also hosted on your server. It might just make for interesting reading.
And at the same time you will find out just how many other websites are hosted on the same server that hosts your website and this is an issue I will return to in a future post.
