Finding all sites hosted in one web server in shared hosting

In a shared hosting, there will number of sites hosted on a single web server. All these sites will be sharing the same IP address. So if you took one shared hosting, is there any way to know the other sites hosted in the same webserver ? Yes it is possible, see below.

Before explaing the method you need to know without direct admin access to the webserver, we cannot directly find the sites hosted in it, so we have to rely on indirect method. One such Indirect method is to have a web crawler (like that of search engine) list all the websites with same IP address. If any site is not made public or is not accesible to webcrawler then those sites wont be listed using this method.

Steps to list sites hosted in a webserver.
  1. Find the IP address of the webserver. If you know only the domain name of one hosted site in this server, you can find the IP address by using ping command in command prompt. For example, In the command prompt, type "ping yahoo.com" it will return IP address of yahoo.com
  2. Go to Bing Search and use IP operator. So the search string to do this is IP:xx.xx.xx.xx (replace xx.xx.xx.xx with IP address you got in step one)
Now you will find all the sites shareing the same IP address.

Drawbacks of using this method is new sites which are not crawled yet or not yet publicised in the Internet will not be listed. Also, the data listed will depend on the search engine cache, so if a site has changed its IP, it will updated only when the search engine crawls the site next time.

It is always nice to know your neighbouring sites. If you are on a shared hosting, you can see what type of sites are hosted in that server. If sites which are banned or illegal is hosted in same server as yours, then chances are that your site is also blocked by some countries or ISPs. If you find sites which are against your shared hosting providers terms of service, you can report these sites.