How We Eliminate Footprints and Protect Your PBN
Every PBN Hosting service likes to say that they offer “Zero Footprints”, but there’s always the issue of the IP addresses that they’re using to host your sites on. Because there’s other PBN users on those IPs, there’s always the risk of sites on those IPs getting deindexed. That is, of course, until we released LaunchCDN.
- SOA Records: The SOA records are the default for each of our DNS providers, and we never leak your IP address via the SOA record. Sites hosted on Amazon will get Amazon’s default SOA record, the same with Cloudflare and other third party DNS providers that we use. You can check the SOA records for any of your domains with our free SOA Checker tool.
- Name Servers: We use popular DNS providers, with Amazon Route 53 and Cloudflare both randomising the name servers that you get for each domain, and our other DNS hosting providers having many thousands of domains on their name servers, so your sites will blend in with the crowd.
- Data Center Footprints: Using CDNs allows us to avoid data center footprints, as your sites will automatically be hosted in all of the data centers that we have access to via those CDN providers – this means that they will appear to be hosted in the closest data center to the end user, and this shifts based on their location.
- IP Ownership: LaunchCDN doesn’t own any of the IP addresses that we serve your sites on, and we don’t use any dedicated IPs to serve your sites to the public. Your sites will always appear to be coming from the CDN provider that you choose when you deploy the site. These include Amazon Cloudfront, Cloudflare, StackPath, Verizon, and more.
- No Dedicated IPs: Some of our competitors use Virtual Private Servers from cloud providers like DigitalOcean, Linode and Vultr, claiming that your site will be alongside popular sites. What they don’t tell you is that they have a dedicated IP, which means that the only web sites on those IPs are their customer’s sites, which creates a “bad neighborhood” and increases the chances that your site will be deindexed.
On LaunchCDN, we always use the same shared IP pools from the CDN providers that all of their customers have access to, meaning that your sites will be hosted on IPs that have real web sites on them. - Outbound Connections are Masked: We also mask all outbound connections from your WordPress sites, so that they are never tied to the underlying server using rotating IP addresses for the outbound connections from your WordPress site.
- Mail Server (MX) Records: Unlike one of our competitors, when we deploy the DNS records for your domains, we also set up either Mail Forwarding through popular providers or let you set the MX records for email providers including FastMail, Zoho and Yandex. Not having MX records for your domain is a nasty footprint that we’ve made sure to avoid.
- Hosted Alongside Real Sites: Cloudflare hosts over 13% of the web now according to W3techs, and Amazon CloudFront almost 1%. When you use LaunchCDN, you get to host your sites alongside those real sites, on the IPs of those CDN providers.
How We Protect Against Cloudflare-related Footprints That Leak IPs
There are tools out there that some people claim can show the real IP behind a CDN, usually targeted at Cloudflare. These tools rely on one of a few different methods that have been used in the past to reveal the underlying server IP.
We protect against all of them, including:
- Historic IP data before enabling the CDN: This is the method that Crimeflare uses to attempt to reveal the IP address behind the CDN. When you host your sites with LaunchCDN, they’ve only ever been added on our servers with the CDN layer enabled, there’s no history of the web server IP on our service before the CDN was enabled.
- Cloudflare allows traffic to cPanel Ports: Cloudflare is configured to proxy all requests to standard cPanel ports, which is one of the other common ways that can be used to detect the server behind the CDN. We don’t use cPanel servers, so this isn’t an issue for sites hosted on LaunchCDN.
- Other DNS records (eg MX, cPanel subdomains): When we deploy the DNS records for your domain, we only deploy the records required for your web site which are protected by the CDN, and we use third party e-mail forwarding providers or your choice of popular e-mail hosting services, if you’d like to run a full email service on that domain. That way, there’s nothing that reveals the server that is hosting your site behind the CDN.