Who Are Your Internet Neighbors?

December 9th, 2009 by Rich H.

Do you know who your internet neighbors are?

Would you buy a lot, build a house, and move your family in if the next-door neighbor was a notorious drug kingpin? Of course not!

It’s important to consider that “where” your business “lives” online is just as important. I’m not talking about your URL or domain name; I’m talking about the Net block your IP addresses are assigned from, and who the company providing them is.

Spam, adult-oriented sites, and gambling sites generate lots of revenue. They can afford the same servers, support, and bandwidth your business can. They also attract a lot of negative attention in the form of Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) attacks, hacking attempts, and probably the worst: blocking and filtering from legitimate networks and mail servers.

When network operators and email system administrators see lots of spam or non-legitimate traffic from a given network, they’ll often block it. Sure, some legitimate traffic is blocked along with the bad, but it’s typically impossible or too costly to differentiate the good from the bad. If the owner of a Net block has a reputation for continuing to do business with clients that generate “negative attention”, an administrator will often block/filter all of the net blocks owned or operated by that provider.

This all happens behind the scenes and often completely unknown to you. It’s not until your business starts having a hard time getting emails delivered, or if your clients are complaining they can’t get to your site, that you know there’s a problem.

Take the following analogy as an example: Let’s pretend hosting and network providers are actually shipping companies. Your emails or the text and graphics on your site are actually little packages. You contract with a shipping company to deliver all those packages. If the company you contracted, “Fly-by-Night Shipping Co. Ltd.” has a reputation for delivering illegal substances, letter bombs, and unsolicited explicit adult-oriented advertisements, it’s safe to say their delivery man probably isn’t getting through the front door at very many locations to deliver your packages.

The same thing happens on the net. Your legitimate “packages” may not get delivered due to the net block’s or provider’s reputation and the companies they accept business from. What’s worse is, you may not even know why your packages aren’t getting through. In some cases, they’re not refused, but accepted and immediately dropped or “thrown away”. This leads to completely inconsistent experiences from your customers and the potential for lots of lost revenue and re-work.

Wondering what you can do to avoid this? Be diligent when selecting a network or hosting provider. Ask them straight out if they accept business from adult-oriented, gambling, or gaming sites. No provider will ever admit to accepting business from spammers, but try searching their name + spam on Google. Not everything you read online is true, but if an overwhelming majority of unrelated people are saying the same thing, there’s a good chance there’s some truth in it. Use your head. Be as careful online as you are with everything else regarding your business. A little money saved upfront could cost a fortune down the line in dollars, reputation, and time.