I just returned home from an amazing weekend in Orlando, FL. I had the honor to speak at the Internet Success System conference headed by one of my favorite mentors, Mark Hendricks. (Get to know Mark, he will change your life!)
One of the topics I discussed with the group was the importance of having a good web hosting provider. I've had my WordPress sites hosted with *HostGator for over a year and their service has been fantastic.
However, being as proactive as I am about website security, I always have a contingency plan. One of things I include in my plan is to have my sites monitored every day for malware and any unauthorized changes to my DNS, Whois and SSL certificates. (I use and HIGHLY recommend *Sucuri Web Integrity Monitoring.)
So today, I'm checking my emails and I get an alarming alert from Sucuri. This alert informs me that my WordPress sites on HostGator have a new IP address.
That certainly got my attention! I did not make any changes to my hosting. I did not log-in to my registrar and change anything there. Without Sucuri monitoring my websites, I would have never known this change occurred today. (Thank you to David Dede and Sucuri for providing me this must-have service).
So rather than panicking, I quickly logged in to my cPanel at Hostgator and checked my dedicated IP address, and sure enough the IP is changed.
I sent in a support ticket to HostGator immediately and asked why I had a new IP address at 12:20pm and by 2:17pm I received this response:
Hello,
I apologize for the trouble and for any frustration however, the IP address had changed on your account because we had migrated all of the accounts from the old server your account was setup on to a newer server that has newer hardware and is much more powerful. Are you noticing any issues since this migration was done, or was your only concern the IP address change?
We apologize for any inconvenience and if you need further assistance or if you have any other questions please let us know.
Thanks!
Best regards,Stephen
Linux Systems Administrator
HostGator.com LLC
http://support.hostgator.com
I replied back that I was glad they upgraded my hosting server (the more powerful and up-to-date hardware the better) and I have not noticed any issues with my websites. However, I felt that they should have discussed this with me ahead of time and asked for my approval.
What if that IP address was needed for something like my merchant account and I was unable to process any payments while I was away? Or the fact that having a dedicated IP address is suppose to help with search engine optimization?
Hopefully, my SEO will not be affected and my site is faster and smoother.
I'm glad I pay attention and have website monitoring! What if someone had broke in and change my IP address other than my host? Without daily scanning it could of been months or years before I ever noticed.
Leave your feedback
Are you monitoring your website for unauthorized changes and malware? If so, what service or program do you use? How much do you think an IP address change affects SEO? Do you think it's OKAY for a hosting company to make changes without your consent? I'd love to hear your comments. Be sure to leave one below.
Securely yours,
Regina Smola
WordPress Security Expert
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UPDATE May 3, 2011 at 644pm CST:
I decided to send in another support ticket to ask HostGator why they would change my dedicated IP address if they just upgraded/moved me to another server. I mean really, it doesn't make sense since the dedicated IP has nothing to do with my hosting per-say. Here was their response:
Hello,
Unfortunately the IP address change was a decision made at the data center level as part of the upgrade process. These upgrades were necessary to keep the performance of the server stable. Although an IP address change may have some affect on SEO rankings (nobody really can confirm this) it would not have more affect than if one was to transfer their hosting from one server to another.
Alternatively if this upgrade did not take place the entire server could have performance issues along with downtime which would undoubtedly cause issues in terms of ranking considering the search engines would not be able to crawl the sites properly.
We apologize for any inconveniences this may have caused and if there is anything else we can assist you with please let us know.
I then sent in another ticket asking them WHY THEY DIDN'T ASK OR INFORM ME. We'll see what they come up with next.
The plot thickens. I got another response from HostGator and updated the post above.
Hey Regina,
Definitely a thickening plot..
Elliott
I used to host with a company that decided to move everything to Hostopia and they did it with virtually no warning. To say they screwed up the transfers would be an understatement. These geniuses decided to do us all a “favor” by going into our sites and changing the ColdFusion programming so we wouldn’t have to. #1) You don’t mess with anyone’s code and 2) I guess they didn’t realize that when we uploaded revisions to our sites, we would clobber their revisions. I pulled all our business, about $300/mo, from these knuckleheads.
Hi Kurt,
Wow! Some favor they did for ya there. Good grief! Glad you switched.
So far my sites seem to be functioning normally (keeping my fingers crossed).
Thanks for sharing,
Regina Smola
Kurt,
Oops, I forgot to ask you a question… Since you’re an SEO expert, how will the dedicated IP address change affect my SEO?
~ Regina
Never had any problems with my host Namesco, they’ve been brilliant. I also use Pingdom to keep an eye on things.
May have to write a PHP script that will monitor changes like IP address.
Am intrigued as to what difference an IP address change would make to SEO.
Hi Elliott,
Thanks for your comment. Ohhh, nice. I have never heard of Pingdom before. Looks like a fantastic service! Thanks for sharing.
I sent Kurt a message to hop on over here and answer the IP change and SEO question. I’m waiting with bated breath!
~ Regina
Hi Regina,
Your welcome… They’re well worth every $0.01.
Not that my host has much downtime, I’ve used my host for ten years and can’t even remember the last down time..
Elliott
Nice –
not only do we have to watch out for the hackers, but now we have to keep an eye on the hosting company making changes that were not authorized…
At Niche Simple, when I owned it, we occasionally had to do this as well. But a move was never completed before the clients were notified…
David
Hi David,
Yes, isn’t it something. I’m so glad that the IP change didn’t affect my merchant account. We’ll see if it affects my SEO.
I wish HG would follow your example when you owned your hosting company. Would of been nice to be asked first.
Thanks for your comment,
Regina
I also think it will be interesting to know how IP changes affect SEO. Recently the hosts for my reseller account notified us that they were going to move us all to new servers and did a great job of keeping us updated- I would have expected that of Hostgator as well. Hopefully it was just an oversight on their part.
I use Is My Website Up Now for monitoring my sites. I also have a free account at Montastic, so when there are issues I can compare notes from the 2 sites.
Hey Kathy,
Thanks so much for your comment and your recommendations. I’ll certainly check them out.
~ Regina
Regina, Elliott, David & Kathy: Changing the IP shouldn’t affect SEO much. It’s the domain that is indexed, not the IP. The only way it would is that the best way to build inbound links is to get them from web servers on other IP addresses. For that matter, some search engines also look to see if two or more websites that link to each other are registered to the same person. (You can probably understand the insights they would get from that.)
Don’t worry about a changed IP address.
— Kurt
Hi Kurt,
Thanks for your comment. I’m glad you took my worry away.
Thanks again,
Regina
Hi Kurt,
That’s pretty much as I thought it would be.
Nice to have someone confirm it.
Elliott
I feel your pain.
In late 1994 I started my first website with a family owned hosting business in California. The service was great. Boy was I spoiled. They really wanted customers and they cared about their reputation. After that business was sold it went through two more acquisitions until a Canadian company owned it. I remained with this host out of convenience.
I moved finally after this company turned off my websites for one entire month and refused to answer questions. One of their company executives told a help desk employee to tell me to stop emailing him. I have seen the worst and the best has still been far away from what I would like. You were treated as I have learned to expect. It did not surprise me.
As these companies grow the service often gets much worse. The first thing I noticed was that tech support wasn’t. It’s either moved off shore or incompetent minions are given a telephone, log a call, and you wait. One company made no bones that they didn’t work weekends and let the server my sites were on remain down for three days.
The bigger companies are so large, and their customers are so numerous, they have given up trying to find ways to notify customers of maintenance issues. They almost all respond later rather than sooner. My coping mechanism was simple. I did my best to learn and understand everything I had control over so I could fix things myself. This pays off. At one host a tech person had run a bunch of scripts against my sites looking for exploits. In so doing he had done something that caused the affected site not to load. I went to my site, looked above root and found the scripts he had been using. I was able to determine what he did and why my site was down. Tech Support never did remove the scripts their internal hackers used. I renamed the file extensions from php to something else. It was some four years later that another techie found them, asked me about them, and removed them. Four years.
I’ve had support tell me that they have tried to get in touch with me when I know they are fibbing and just trying to cover their incompetence. As a former support person myself I cringe every time I have make a call or send an email.
Recently, one of my hosts told me three times over a month and a half that I didn’t host with them. Had they looked at my A record they would have had a different answer. My DNS reflects my connection to CloudFlare.com, a service I depend on to keep the hackers and spammers under control. No one would listen. When I tried to call tech support their phone system hung up on me. I poked around and fixed my own issue.
What you will always find is that even when substandard service is delivered their sales and marketing people will ALWAYS try to sell you something. It’s part of their script. SUch attempts have only served to make me the customer from He**. Why would I buy new stuff when they can’t deal with the stuff I already bought? The big companies don’t care. If they lose me, so what, someone else will always come in to take the place of an unhappy customer. There’s a mathematical formula for this I’m sure, or years ago things would have changed. I am convinced that most of these companies are run by sales and marketing people with no interest whatsoever in service quality or support. The entire effort is on selling more and more and more.
The most egregious insult to customers is sending tech support off shore. I’d swear the same lady in India works for at least four of the computer companies I’ve tried to contact. I’m now at the point where I refuse to deal with off-shore tech support. That happened a few years ago when I called about an email problem. The “clerk” said, “I can reset your email.” By the time I had asked what that meant she had indeed reset everything. All of my email was gone. Lost forever.
The best thing any site owner can do is understand the technology as best they can so they can determine what kinds of problems are truly serious. Fix the problems you can fix and wait out the ones you can’t. Eventually, even an unreported issue gets fixed. Expect that a company will not tell you the truth, or will keep facts from you to avoid accountability and embarrassment. These companies do not want to explain the details.
My favorite tip. Ask to speak to a MANAGER and don’t let the guy on the other end of the phone call say no. If you do get a good tech support person on the phone be complimentary and ask to speak to the boss so you can brag about the service you received. When you call ask for the guy who helped you before and tell the operator you really appreciated his/her service. They won’t cooperate with you but you have already set the expectation for them. They probably already know who the good guy is. At my current host I still occasionally talk to John. John knows what he’s doing and cares about his customers. The few times John is involved are when I have fully documented my concern and the minions know they can’t help.
When you catch a company making changes to your code, make sure you hold them accountable. I had one change an IP address of a database after they moved it without my knowledge.. One went into various WordPress config files and removed items they didn’t like. The guy fancied himself an expert when he was just guessing. In one event, my .htaccess was modified and the perp failed to save the original.
The best host? I have never met one but I can hope.
Regina, I enjoy your blog and like to get your emails.
Hi Doug,
My mouth dropped open in shock when I read about your hosting nightmares. WOW! Sounds like you have been through it all. Thank you so much for sharing. I truly appreciate you taking the time to tell us.
I really like what you pointed out about…
I feel the same way about learning and understanding everything we have control over so WE can fix things if necessary, or at least have an understanding so we know WHERE to look for answers.
It’s amazing that it took four years to get the scripts removed from your site. WOW!
Also there have been many times I will call for my clients websites and their hosting company can’t find their account. You can give the top level domain, IP address, nameserver, their name and email and they seem dumbfounded. Just drives me crazy.
I totally agree with you about them trying to upsell you something. This especially cracks me up when you are calling because there is a problem with their server setup. Certainly doesn’t make me want to buy their newest feature.
My pet peeve is also transferring me to an offshore tech support for anything!!! Someone told me that if you call a company, you can press *2 for Spanish (or whatever the # is) and then when they answer, tell them you only speak English and they WILL transfer you back to the US for someone you can understand.
Wow that stinks about losing all your email. Yikes! I hope you had it downloaded in Outlook or gmail.
Thanks for sharing your great tips as well. I think there is a huge lesson for all of us to read your comment. I would like to add it to my blog as a post if you wouldn’t mind (of course giving you credit). Let me know if that would be okay.
~ Regina Smola
A few more things to consider (and if you hover over my web site link you may think I’ll be playing devil’s advocate — not necessarily):
– Watch that the new IP address is not blacklisted. While most likely not done intentionally, you might find your new IP used to Do Bad Things.
– For larger hosts — or even smaller ones — ask to see if you can have a dedicated account manager. You might find out you already have one.
– Sometimes when moving a server it is better to beg forgiveness than ask permission. If your server was not solely yours — and chances are good that it isn’t/wasn’t — there may be hundreds of other accounts on that machine that have to be moved as well. If a drive is showing signs of fatigue, etc. it may be an emergency call to just move everything right away.
I agree that a non-emergency situation does warrant advance email notification, at the least. Keeping good lines of communication open is always a good thing. And it should be standard practice that your account should have a flag that you should always be notified of any changes beforehand.
– Most hosts/data centers have policies in place about how IP addresses are bound to individual machines. So IP address portability is probably not something that’s on offer. This has been my experience, but YMMV.
– Check your host’s terms of service docs as well: there may be info in there that relates to IP addresses and other hosting features. And note that these terms are often dictated by the data center’s terms of service (my company’s servers are at SoftLayer, as are HostGator’s). So if your host’s terms have a lot of legalese, chances are that’s the DC talking as much as the host.
/patrick
Hi Patrick,
Thanks for your comment. I don’t think that it was an emergency situation in my case, and that I could understand. If my site was going to go down then I would completely have no issue with moving it, getting it live again and then telling me about it later. (Such as sending out a canned response.)
I will certainly check out the TOS closer and see what they have to say about dedicated IP address, server transfers, etc.
Any suggestions on what tool to use to track past bad behaviors of an IP address? You’ve got me inquisitive now. Even though it may not be blacklisted now, if it’s on the “warning, keep an eye on this IP address” list, then I’d like to know about it.
Thanks again for sharing,
Regina Smola
The link Mr Hendricks supplies below should work fine. You can also use the lookup tool at http://cbl.abuseat.org/ for the Composite Black List.
Don’t worry too much about any timeout errors. RBLs come and go and some are more responsive than others.
Hi Patrick,
Thanks for the link. I had not seen that site before. I looked up my before and after IP and both are clear. And thanks for letting me know about the timeouts. Whew, that’s a relief.
~ Regina
Regina,
First… thanks for being a great speaker at our recent conference, you were absolutely terrific and really delivered great info to all the attendees on how to better secure themselves and their web properties too.
Second… changing of your IP address can have a HUGE impact on email deliverability. If you have worked hard to make sure your server IP address is “clean” (not on any spam list) and then your host changes your IP address to one that is tainted and on a spam list, then you’re going to have trouble getting delivered to many ISPs around the world.
Everyone should get the IP address of the server they are on (not necessarily the IP address of your domains, but rather the server IP address, or check both), and go to this page and input the IP addresses you want to check:
http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
And if you are on any lists, contact your host for help if it is the server address, or contact the spam list service if it is yours.
Mark Hendricks
Hi Mark,
Thanks for your awesome tips and new tool to use. Wow! My email deliverability didn’t even cross my mind. But you are so right!!
I just checked my old and new dedicated IP address. The test runs fine and says all are okay except when it gets to the last two, then I get this error:
CYBERLOGIC TIMEOUT ERROR, Reponse code=2 0
SPAMRBL TIMEOUT ERROR, Reponse code=2 0
I then ran a SMTP test and all were okay except…
Warning – Reverse DNS does not match SMTP Banner
Hmmmm, now I have to go and find out what that means.
~ Regina Smola
P.S. I was truly honored that you asked me to speak at your event. I had such a great time listening to all the other speakers (including you) and have 10 pages of ah-ha moments. And all the participants were fantastic. I learned something that will help grow my business from every person there. Thanks again.
Hi Regina,
You’d think at least a batch email would go out to all dedicated IP users informing them of the switch. I mean, it is a paid service, not a free one. Free is one thing, paid is another.
About the IP address, actually yes the server IP address does matter a tiny bit when it comes to SEO. I wrote about it here and here (hope you don’t mind the links).
I imagine your hosting is located in the same general area as your previous IP, so you probably don’t have to worry. I’d say if your new IP was on a server located in the EU or some other country, then maybe that would be worth mentioning to HostGator.
Hi John,
Thanks for the links!!! That helps.
I did look up both the old and new dedicated IP address and they are both in the same local.
Was not please to learn that the hosting company was HostGator. Especially since I”m with HostGator too. Here’s hoping it doesn’t affect you and like you it would have been nice to have received advance warning
Hi Robert,
No, I was not pleased either. I sent them another ticket yesterday about why they did not inform me and no response yet. Hmmm. I have never had trouble with them. I do realize that hosting can never be perfect, but a heads up would have been nice.
~ Regina
Hi Regina,
Can you run CRON jobs with your hosting plan?
It shouldn’t be that difficult to write a PHP script which checks the IP address of the server and compare it to what it should be, if there is a difference then sends out an email alerting you to the fact and/or a Twitter Direct Message (which if you have set your account up can be sent to your mobile phone. This would effectively create an alert by email and a free mobile phone SMS alert. It’s just a case of where you store the “proper” IP address – within the code, in a seperate file or in a database table (such as WP options).
The PHP server variable ‘SERVER_ADDR’ should contain the relevant IP address. For more on PHP server variables see: http://php.net/manual/en/reserved.variables.server.php
It’s certainly a script I could spend a couple of hours creating and experimenting with.
If you can’t run CRON jobs WP has it’s own version of CRON that you should be able to use instead.
Hi Elliott,
Thanks for the information. Yes, I can run cron jobs. I have Sucuri so it does give me an alert about the IP address, which is how I found out about HostGator changing it in the first place. Is that what you mean? I will check out the link for PHP server variables.
Thanks again,
Regina
I was on about writing my own script in PHP and running it as a CRON job say every six hours
it would then automatically check the IP address hasn’t changed on the server every six hours and notify someone if it was different. I’m always looking for ways of doing things which mean I don’t have to pay for them!
You can get a lot of useful information about a whole host (excuse the pun!) of things via PHP server variables
Elliott
Hi Elliott,
If I had time to learn, I’d do it myself too 🙂 How techy are you? I might have some stuff I need written that you may be interested? Techies are hard to find now-days.
But I also enjoy using automated services that will enhance my security and don’t mind paying for them if they do the job. I’m glad I have Sucuri that alerts me whenever something’s up and it’s only around $7.99/month so it works great for me.
~ Regina
Regina…
The changed IP address won’t really affect your SEO. Search engines rely on the domain name… knowing that people move web hosts all the time… and simply moving from one web host to another has no real affect on SEO.
Ed
Hi Ed,
Thanks for your insight. BTW, it was nice meeting you at ISS. I checked out your website, very nice! And I love your Facebook Fan Page. Very cool!
** AVOID HOSTGATOR AT ALL COSTS ***
While most of the time there are no problems with this hoster, it is the times like this when it is clear how well it is managed.
Hosted on hostgator for several years they have always, I mean ALWAYS make changes to their systems without ever contacting you. Even when this happens once a year, it sometimes causes a complete website down due to their changes.
The recent IP changes, or what they call “upgrades” happened without ANY notification, which created a total disaster. Fractioned database, failing systems, what not.
To repeat, this hoster has changed IP, which is crucial to all the communications, without ever EVER notifying customers. The ONLY message was AFTER they have performed the change, letting you know you have one (1) week to handle this ip change. WHAT A JOKE HOSTER. Now you, the website(s) owner have to deal with all this mess by yourself
*** AVOID HOSTGATOR.COM AT ALL COSTS **
They have done this to me as well (yesterday), without any communication! I think this is extremely bad customer service and a total disregard for me and the security systems I have in place. They have even removed my backup of the (old) server. I don’t trust them anymore and I am looking into moving to another provider. This is totally unacceptable for $53 a month.
Hostgator now notify you before any IP address changes – I got three warning emails, and then follow up ones! I guess they read your blog ; )