Do you know who your internet neighbors are?
Would you buy a lot, build a house, and move your family in if the next-door neighbor was a notorious drug kingpin? Of course not!
It’s important to consider that “where” your business “lives” online is just as important. I’m not talking about your URL or domain name; I’m talking about the Net block your IP addresses are assigned from, and who the company providing them is.
Spam, adult-oriented sites, and gambling sites generate lots of revenue. They can afford the same servers, support, and bandwidth your business can. They also attract a lot of negative attention in the form of Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) attacks, hacking attempts, and probably the worst: blocking and filtering from legitimate networks and mail servers.
When network operators and email system administrators see lots of spam or non-legitimate traffic from a given network, they’ll often block it. Sure, some legitimate traffic is blocked along with the bad, but it’s typically impossible or too costly to differentiate the good from the bad. If the owner of a Net block has a reputation for continuing to do business with clients that generate “negative attention”, an administrator will often block/filter all of the net blocks owned or operated by that provider.
This all happens behind the scenes and often completely unknown to you.
