 Did you know that your website it could be blacklisted might have red flags against it could have a bad reputation. And this is all without you doing anything wrong at all. The thing is when we start a new website on our hosting or set up a new server, well that server has an IP address that could have been used in the past with some dodgy website. Now imagine you set up your website you get new hosting or you spin up a new server and you put your website on that server on that hosting. But what if that hosting that server it had an IP address that used to be used way back for some dodgy site like something like a scamming website or hacked website that did and put out a lot of malware or even like a dirty website. This can affect your site today by creating some black lists and some red flags and hurting your overall reputation. So what we're going to do here is I'm going to show you how to check for it. What to do if you do find out that hey my IP is you know it's got a bad history and how to go ahead and protect yourself going forward. The first thing you got to do is find your IP address. You got to go into your hosting and find it. Back here I got hostinger and navigated around a bit but I was able to find it right over here. Your IP address will look something like this. Now if you can't find it like I did go through my Elementor hosting and I couldn't find the IP and these situations just reach out to support and ask them hey what is the IP address of my site. After you get it well you could just do a Google search and you would search IP reputation checker. So you could do that and you're going to get a lot of different platforms that check for IPs. I already got a few of them here the ones that I use. I will leave a link to all of these inside the description of this video to make it a lot easier but I'm going to go over here let me copy this IP over here. I'm going to go paste it in here and go ahead and hit check it out and while that is checking it out I'm going to do a few of them. I'm just a type that got a bit of OCD so I like to be extra careful and check out usually three or four. All right and let me oh I got to do that capture. Oops is that it? Okay cool now let's go take a look at the results. Whoa oh my gosh okay what is the same right here reputation issue detected. This IP address has been detected as a proxy connection which could be hurting your IP suspicious IP okay well I was not expecting this to happen but this one right here I found is very sensitive. I've had some being flagged just because they were brand new in fact what we want is a brand new IP so that could be the case but this is saying that it's just a proxy connection. It is showing though that it's not on any black list so even though it's saying suspicious it's not saying it's bad. Let's see what happens when we perform a full lookup. Okay so all right nothing found for the spam report is proxied now this one is showing a proxy VPN detected which is strange because I'm not using a VPN and look at I'm not like server level type of developer and this is not my expertise. I'm a web designer and front-end developer if something feels off I'm going to go straight to my hosting support but right here shows is low risk it looks like it's just a proxy no spam found so that's good now let's go take a look at the next ones now this one right here shows a sender IP reputation neutral all right there's nothing right here there's no block list so it's not listed on anything bad right here if we look it just shows neutral no block list this is good right here this is what we're looking for we're looking for the block list let's go to the next one okay here we go the IP has only recently started sending emails and therefore still has an unknown reputation risk level suspicious you would think this is bad right the thing is this is actually what I want to see I want to see this is a brand new IP it's a good thing to have a new IP and let's take a look over here and okay detections count we got zero out of 82 so look at it's good it's not on any blacklist it doesn't have any flags against it and right now what we're getting and I wasn't expecting this I wasn't expecting because I didn't test this before we're doing all this live right now I wasn't expecting those suspicious notifications now I have tested my own IPs and I have gotten some of those suspicion flags but that does not mean the website is flagged it means that the IP is brand new that was it and that is what we're looking for in fact if we go over here we could see that everything is set up right now this is what hostinger they have the proxy on it you know they have it set to true not sure what that means but I'm sure if it was bad it would probably be read this to me looks like a very good brand new IP address something that I am happy to have and hostinger is a good host so I do expect this kind of level from them and here's the thing some hosts are known for having and reusing bad IPs now the IP is bad it should be junked but some of them still repopulate and reuse those bad IPs this looks good right here to me I have though been on the other side where I've tested an IP one of my own servers and the IP came out and turned out that it was on a few blacklists I had no idea the IP was dirty it was a dirty IP so in that situation what I had to do was I had to spin up a new server I had to migrate the sites over to it and now what I do is every time I do start a new server I always check the IP first this way I could prevent any harm coming to my domain the ranking emails that are being sent out the things that these blacklists can affect I want to prevent that from the jumpstart also prevent having to do a bunch of extra work with the migrations if you are comfortable managing your own servers you're using something like cloudways run cloud these are what I'm using well you can spin up a new server test that IP on the new server out see if it's clean and if it is migrate your sites over to it but if you're not comfortable doing something like that or if you're hosting doesn't allow something like that contact your hosting providers you need to contact them you need to get in touch with their support right away and any good hosting provider with decent support is going to help you to fix it they're going to spin up a new server for you but if you do have a hosting provider and you cannot get in touch with their support and their support is unwilling to help you you got to leave them look at here's the thing when it comes to hosting there's good hosting there's bad hosting and bad hosting is going to have a very very negative and costly effect on you in your websites in the long run you want to avoid them as soon as you identify your host as being a bad host run get you a good one this is the reason why I promote only really good hosts that I know support is going to be there to help now I use cloudways I use run cloud I use hosting these are my go tos get good hosting that is the key in the secret to fixing these issues if they come up I'll leave links to those inside the description well I hope this quick tip of the day helps you out I hope that it helps you protect your site let me know too do you have any tips for protecting websites when you start them off or has this happened to you let us know inside the comments and that's it for this video also don't forget to do all that good YouTube stuff you know like and subscribe also share this one because this one this is one of those things that I mean for myself I didn't realize how important it was I didn't even realize that I needed to do this until I found out heard from somebody else I went and checked my IPs and I had a bunch of servers one of them was flagged I did not know it it had a bad history so I had to clean that up so share it let other people know what to do and that is it for this one well thank you for watching I really appreciate it and I'll be back again with some more helpful tips WordPress design stuff you know all that good stuff see you soon