risks

Do you want to know who is your neighbor?

Do you know what other websites are in the same server as yours?Today I received a request from a customer to make a change on their email. They moved their main website to another provider and are hosting in one of our HUGE competitors where your website is in a cluster server with maybe 10,000 others. I researched what company they were using so they could contact them directly and just by curiosity took a look at what other websites are been hosted on the same IP address (analogous to a physical street address on the Internet). At the very top was www.racial-humiliation.com. The site is plagued with anti-semitic, anti-islamic and aryan racist verbiage that turned my stomach. It claimed to be “entertainment” but it exposed a big chunk of what I consider wrong with our society. By far their favorite is the “n” word.
In all fairness the nature of your server neighbors may not affect you greatly. Google used to penalize websites that shared the same IP address on their searches, but they changed their formula years ago. The most relevant implication that sharing that IP address (or block) has to do with email. If one of your neighbors is actively spamming or has been hacked from the same server where your website resides, the whole server will quickly get blacklisted and suddenly you may stop receiving email inquiries from your contact form, your clients will not get their confirmation email when they place an order on your eCommerce store and your newsletter will bounce back from major email providers like Comcast, Hotmail Gmail etc.
That is the big advantage that we, “Boutique Web Hosters” have over the hosting farms. Not only do we take pride in our technical support and getting things solved fast, but some of us are very picky on who do we accept as clients. In our case we have 3 redundant monitoring solutions to discover hacking, spamming and other breaches of our terms and conditions. plus a very aggressive set of tools installed on our servers to prevent them in the first place.
In the end is a matter of choice as a client: Do you want to have your office or store in a building with guards, CCTV, intrusion prevention and security doors or do you want to have it in a building where the KKK meets, a fly by night scammer lures people in and drug dealing is done on plain sight. Do you think that the difference in price of 4 cappuccinos versus 1 capuccino of rent per month is worth it?
I’m very eager to hear your opinion, please share.

AMPHION communications develops solutions for the small and medium sized businesses. We are expert implementing Google Apps for Business. AMPHION has been in the Web and Email hosting business since 1996 and our goal is to develop solutions that allows us to render better service and have happier clients.

Give us a call at 888-AMPHION (888-267-4466) for a free 10 minute consultation and see if what we are doing for our clients can help you.