Limited IPs for websurfing
As I’ve been creating the IP Database I’ve been thinking about exactly how many IP addresses are visitng my sites, compared to the total number of IPs I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that less then 10% of the 4+ billion IP addresses are used for web surfing or anything that generates visits on web sites. It may even be much lower then that. If you do a trace route between your IP address and http://www.spiderhunter.com you will see anywhere from 8 to 15 hops, or IP addresses that are in between here and you. So if the average is 10, (and that is most likely low) that means 9 of those IP addresses are only used for routing, or 90% of the IPs are used for hosting the website or Internet infrastructure. Then you take into account that I have 128 IPs for my network here. Only 1 or 2 of them are ever used or seen as being used for surfing the Internet. The rest are for web sites or services. I have several clients that needed to get static IPs for their email servers and the smallest IP range that they could get was 32 IPs. That equates to one for surfing and one for SMTP and 30 IP addresses that go unused. This happens a lot. So when you are looking at the daunting task of IP tracking it’s not as bad as you think. No longer are you looking at 4+ billion IPs, it more like 400 million … I guess that is still pretty daunting … Maybe it’s more like … 0.001% … that still 4 million …. hmm …
