Design / Usability

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"How can we detect whether the hosting company we use (bigbytes.net) has the real hosting hardware infrastructure itself or is a reseller of another company's services?" -- Ravi Rajapathirane

Every computer connected to the Internet has an assigned IP address that looks like this: 123.123.123.123 -- four sets of numbers separated by periods. (IP stands for "Internet Protocol"). These IP addresses are assigned in groups or blocks of several hundred at a time to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and web hosting services.

When you log onto the Internet through an ISP, for example, you are usually assigned a temporary IP address from a pool of IP addresses available to your ISP. When you log off, that number will be reassigned to someone else who is logging on. (It's possible to obtain a static IP address, but it's more expensive.) Your website, too, will have an IP address -- one permanently assigned to your site by your web hosting service from among the blocks of IP addresses your hosting service has available. If you can find which company has been assigned the block of IP addresses that your IP address appears in, you can usually identify the main hosting service that physically hosts your site.

Finding the name of the hosting company that ultimately hosts your domain is a two-step process:

1. Determine the IP address of the domain in question using a program called "traceroute" at a site such as (a) Telstra (http://tcruskit.telstra.net/cgi-bin/trace) or (b) Opus-One Traceroute Tool (http://www.opus1.com/www/traceroute.html). Traceroute displays the path between the computer that runs the traceroute program and the domain you are trying to trace and each intervening "hop" -- often a dozen "hops" or more. The last entry in the string is the domain you are tracing and shows the target IP address. BigBytes.net traces to IP address 216.180.250.190.
2. Determine which company owns the IP block in which your website IP address is located. You can do this through searching for your IP address at one of the following Regional Internet Registrars, each serving a different geographical region.

   APNIC	Asia Pacific region	http://www.apnic.net/search/
   RIPE	Europe, Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa	http://www.ripe.net/perl/whois
   ARIN	North America, part of the Caribbean, and subequatorial Africa	http://www.arin.net/whois/
   LACNIC	Latin America and part of the Caribbean	http://lacnic.net/sp/

Checking of each of these for the IP address, ARIN shows that the IP address is assigned to Global Net Access, LLC, Atlanta, GA, USA, which is assigned all the IP addresses in the following blocks: 216.180.224.0 to 216.180.255.255. The webmaster has an e-mail address at gnax.com. A WHOIS search for BigBytes.net, the company you are tracing, however, reveals that they are registered with a home address in Laguna, Philippines.

With this information one might deduce that BigBytes.net is a reseller (either directly or indirectly) of services provided by Global Net Access, the company that actually owns the hardware and physically hosts the website. But they could be (a) co-locating their own computers in Global Net Access's building to have access to a large "pipe" to the Internet and (b) renting IP space, since IP addresses can be difficult to obtain. You'll only learn the exact details by inquiring directly.

You may receive quicker and more knowledgeable customer support when you contract for hosting services with the company that physically hosts your website -- though I am sure there are many exceptions to this.