Is it possible for anybody to see how many websites are shared with another website ?

If so, how can I hide this so if example1.com and example2 are on the same server, no one should know this fact ?

Thanks for any help.

Yes, using a reverse IP lookup someone can see get a list of other websites running on that server.

You could try masking this to an extent by using something like cloudflare as a "CDN"/DNS. It's free. When checking the IP address of your site a user would then get cloudflare's IP instead of your server IP.

Worth noting, for clarity: A reverse DNS lookup will (generally) only show you the hostname of the server itself. However, if someone goes through the effort of doing a forward DNS lookup on a large number of domains, it will be possible for them to create (and publish) a list of many of the A records that point to a given IP address, e.g. 173.194.75.99.

It turns out that 99% of people don't know enough to do this, and the remaining 1% don't really give a damn. It's the way things are. If a customer wants to prevent this sort of thing from being possible, moving their site to their own Linode would probably be the most reliable approach. (You gotta pay for post office boxes, right?)

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Thanks for the replies.

Well, all the client is looking for is not to have his website associated with one of his own other website (in eyes of public). Both sites resides currently on same linode.

Can I safely keep both of em on same box since as per hoopycat, its something very technical ?

Well, it's very easy for somebody to confirm if they suspect to begin with. If somebody notices that when they do "ping sitea.com" and "ping siteb.com" they get the same IP address, the gig is up.

I have no clue why this would be a concern.

Most people can't spell IP let alone tell you what it really means.

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Either provide enough details for people to help, or sit back and listen to the crickets chirp.
Security thru obscurity is a myth - and really really annoying.

very right. But thats when user particularly guess about siteb knowing sitea. Well all we are looking for is that anybody knowing about just the sitea, can't find out, which other websites are hosted along side. Consider it as, if cutekittens.com and pentagon.com are hosted on same server, a frequent user of cutekittens can't find what other list of websites are being hosted with it.

Hopefully, I made it more clear.

Whois.domaintools can do what you describe to some extend, e.g. http://www.domaintools.com/research/rev ... witter.com

Thats exactly what me or my client are fearing. How can I avoid this considering I don't want to get another linode. 20-25$ isn't a big deal but I already have 4 linodes and me being new in linux administration, its already too much of a work to add a new linode.

Will really appreciate some guidance.

In the "Extras" tab of your dashboard, you can buy additional IP addresses for $1/month. Might do the trick.

Except this would not be a reasonable use of IP addresses and the request would be declined. We are running out of addresses you know .

Fair enough. Actually, I thought we already had run out of addresses. Hopefully my ISP will finally enable IPv6 in 2013 and I will finally be able to enable and test it on my Linode soon.

You could also look into using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) like cloudflare.com to obfuscate your website IP addresses.

You could educate your client and let him know how stupid that fear is. The web has a bazillion shared hosts out there with lots and lots and lots of websites all on one ip.

And there are dozens (if not hundreds) of sites that will tell you which other websites are on your IP - so it's neither an obscure bit of research or rocket science to figure it out.

Either your client can gain some common sense and worry about real scary things instead of "OMG I'm sharing an IP" or he can pony up the money for his own host. Pick one and live with it.

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Either provide enough details for people to help, or sit back and listen to the crickets chirp.
Security thru obscurity is a myth - and really really annoying.

Rational discussion is out the window once a client sees both business.com and horseboners.com on the same IP.