Study of 330 IPs across 11 VPS providers reveals wide gaps in reverse DNS coverage
A reproducible study sampled 30 IPv4 addresses each from 11 major VPS providers — including Vultr, DigitalOcean, Hetzner, and Alibaba Cloud — totalling 330 IPs drawn from each provider's announced AS space. Reverse DNS (PTR record) coverage varied dramatically, from 100% at BandwagonHost to 0% at both Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud, with an overall rate of just 49.4%. The research found that the disparity reflects deliberate provider policy: some providers like Hetzner and Contabo template rDNS across their entire address space, while others like DigitalOcean leave it entirely to customers. Notably, the sampled space includes unallocated addresses, so the figures represent AS-wide rDNS coverage rather than what any individual customer is guaranteed to receive. The dataset also measured blocklist presence, RDAP registration, and BGP origin for each IP, with Spamhaus excluded as it blocks queries from public resolvers.
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