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I've just done a WHOIS search on whois.sc for our company domain and the nameserver section says that our nameservers "(has 428 domains)".

Does that mean there are 428 domains hosted on the same server as ours? The reason I ask is because we pay a hefty fee (more than enough for a dedicated server) for our hosting each month and I want to make sure our company isn't paying stupid money for a shared server, and if they are I'm going to have a word with the guys that run our site.

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  • Instead of looking at whatever data, why not just investigate the hosting package. It will have the relevant information.
    – Daniel B
    Commented Oct 5, 2018 at 13:47
  • We don't have access to view our hosting package, the guys that built our website just charge us a monthly fee for 'hosting' which is why I asked. grawity answered my question anyway
    – user1796225
    Commented Oct 5, 2018 at 15:00
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    Ah, so you’re contracted with a web design agency or whatever. That’s expensive, yes. Whether it’s worth it is a question you must answer yourself. Consider ongoing maintenance, backups, dealing with security breaches, ...
    – Daniel B
    Commented Oct 5, 2018 at 20:39

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Does that mean there are 428 domains hosted on the same server as ours?

Don't confuse web hosting and DNS hosting. They are independent services and usually hosted by separate servers. They have separate administration and quite different resource requirements.

When the 'whois.sc' website talks about nameservers, it strictly means those which host your DNS zone (basically: IP address mappings for the domain and subdomains). It is common for this DNS data to be hosted on a shared server owned by the domain registrar (possibly even holding tens of thousands of zones), and many registrars provide this as a free service.

However, that's completely independent from where the domain's own services are kept. It doesn't tell you anything about whether the website runs on a beefy dedicated server or on a potato.

Instead, to get a guess whether the web server for your main domain is shared or dedicated, you can look at the "IP address:" line slightly below in the same whois.sc result page. If whois.sc has seen other domains pointing to the same address, it will say "X other sites hosted on this server". If it hasn't seen any yet, it'll say "is hosted on a dedicated server".

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  • Thanks for clarifying this, I see now they are only hosting our .com and .co.uk domain on this server. The reason I asked is because we are getting massive fluctuations in server response time, it's still something I need to bring up with them as there's something not right but it just shocked me when I saw the 428 domains.
    – user1796225
    Commented Oct 5, 2018 at 14:57

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