47 of 360 VPS IPs are blacklisted. All 47 are on exactly one list

2026-09-28 · 数据来自公开可复现源 · 作者 One IP

Checking an IP against a DNSBL and seeing "listed" feels like a verdict. Across 360 IPs sampled from 12 VPS providers, 47 came back listed — 13.1%. That number on its own would make you avoid datacenter IPs entirely.

It shouldn't. Every single one of the 47 appears on exactly one list. Not one IP in the sample is listed by two or more providers.

The eight lists

Eight public DNSBLs, 360 IPs each:

Four of the eight lists returned zero hits across the entire sample. SpamCop, UCEProtect, blocklist.de and PSBL — the names people actually recognise — listed nothing.

One list is doing most of the work

41 of the 47 hits — 87% — come from a single list, dnsbl.spfbl.net. That matters because SPFBL is an aggressive, largely automated service with a low bar for inclusion. A listing there is not the same signal as a listing from an established operator, and the two should not be read as equivalent.

Take RackNerd: 25 of its 30 IPs are listed, all on SPFBL, spread across 25 different /24 blocks. Read alone, "25/30 blacklisted" sounds damning. Read against the table above, it means one list operator has decided to list most of a network that four other major operators have never touched.

At the other end, Contabo is 0/30 across all eight lists.

What this means when you check your own IP

If you run an IP reputation check and see a single listing from an automated list you don't recognise, while the established names come back clean, the correct reading is probably "one list operator's policy", not "this IP is dirty". Cross-check against several established lists before acting on it.

Method

360 IPs, 12 providers, 30 IPs each, sampled from each provider's announced BGP prefixes at /24 granularity. Same seed (20260928), reproducible. All 360 had a BGP origin ASN equal to the target provider.

The 360 raw records and the sampler are public: data vps-audit-2026-09.json (CC BY 4.0), method and per-IP detail at the full audit page.

I built PureIP — an IP lookup and network diagnostics toolbox — these 360 records are a byproduct of it.