I was wondering if it is possible to detect if a hosting company's website is a reseller or not just by looking.

What characteristics would a reseller hosting website have, and look like in comparision to a non-reseller hosting website.


For example I was comparing Interliant and ADDR.

big difference there.

you cant tell normally just by looking, doing a traceroute in msdos might, but it wouldnt be definate either.

Here's what I do...

First of all, look for that dreaded U-word, if you find it attached to the word bandwidth, close your browser, and quietly walk away.

If they survived that test, do this: ping suspicioushost.com from dos and get their IP.

Plug their IP in ARIN.net's whois server, or if they're in europe, use RIPE.net(i think, ARIN will tell you).

If the hosts name matches the IP blocks owner's name, then there is a 99% chance you've got a real hosting company.

If not, that doesn't necessarily mean they're bad people, just not fortunate(or brave) enough to own their own 5 thousand foot fully secured multi-backboned datacenter.

Like ma bell would deliver OC3's to a city with only one high school... yeah, right... I want to keep my firstborn, and my arm, leg, and all the rest of my 2000 parts... :D

I guess a definition of a 'real' web hosting provider probably would be helpful here.

The list of web hosting providers who have multi-homed backbone networks and their own netblocks is pretty short.

What other criteria make a web host 'real'?

There's a good question....

I believe that the minimum requirement would be having root access to the server.

Physical control of the server is nice too, but collocating let's most hosts offer much better connections than would be otherwise possible. Even most ISP's only have a t-1, but running your boxes from a 3rd party data center can beat that hands down.