Sep 21, 2008

Find out which sites are sharing your server

As most of you are aware, when you use a free hosting service like Blogger's you have to share. That's right, all your kindergarten lessons have paid off because you have to share your web hosting space with many other people out there.

Have you ever wondered which websites were also hosted on your server? Me too! I especially started to thing about it when my security teacher at school started talking about how if you use a free hosting site, and someone else on the same hosting program uploads some sort of malware to the hosting server, you can potentially get infected as well, or your site may start infecting other people.

One 2004 forum thread I found on Web Host Directory said this:

Geocities and Blogger both make it easy for anyone to set up a Web site without much identification. Blogger, owned by Google, is particularly problematic, says Sophos, with the blog site alone accounting for nearly 2 percent of all malware hosts. I is not only possible for the Blogger sites to host malicious code, but criminal attackers can also inject links to malicious sites in the comments sections of the blogs.


So do you know who you are "sharing the house" with? Do you know who else is living just down the hall? I found a cool site that lets you do a reverse IP domain check to see who else is being hosted on your server. When I checked who was sharing with www.Bauer-Power.net I found that there where 108 other sites on my server. That is nothing, when I did a search for just bauer-power.net I found 3218! I tink that is because bauer-power.net gets forwarded to Google's DNS servers who then forward that to www.bauer-power.net.

The site is called You Get Signal. Here is a screen shot of my results

YouGetSignal sharing servers
When I did a search for www.yahoo.com I found only 37. Now when I do www.google.com I get 1175. Pretty interesting huh?

All in all, nothing too substantial comes from this site except a "neat to know" factor. Its kind of interesting to see who you are sharing the net with, and to know who your neighbors are. How many sites are you sharing your server with?



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