Which VPS provider has clean IPs? 360 IPs tested across 12 providers

2026-10-02 · data from public, reproducible sources · by PureIP

Check your own IP

Most "best VPS" comparisons talk about CPU, RAM and price. Almost none of them talk about the thing that gets you into trouble after you buy: whether the IP range is clean. A cheap box with a poisoned IP costs you more in lost mail, blocked logins and refund cycles than the spec sheet ever saved you.

So I sampled IPs from the actual announced prefixes of 12 providers and measured them against public records. 360 IPs, 30 per provider, fixed seed, reproducible.

What I measured

• Reverse DNS (PTR) — whether the IP has a PTR record at all. Low PTR

coverage means the provider is not managing its address space; it is a strong signal that mail from that range will be treated as suspicious.

• Blocklist status — 8 public DNSBLs (SpamCop, SPFBL, DroneBL and others).
• RDAP registrant — whether the registered organisation actually matches

the provider you think you bought from.

Reverse DNS: 0% to 100%, and the spread is the story

The range is 0% to 100%. That is not noise — it is policy. The Chinese cloud providers essentially do not set PTR records on their international ranges, which means if you buy an Alibaba or Tencent box for a mail server you are starting from the worst possible position. BandwagonHost, DMIT and Hetzner manage reverse DNS properly.

Blocklists: one provider is structurally judged

RackNerd needs unpacking. 25 of 30 IPs were listed, all on dnsbl.spfbl.net, spread across 25 different /24 blocks.

That pattern matters more than the headline number. When hits are scattered across many different /24s, it is not a few dirty IPs — it means the whole network is being judged. Moving to another IP in the same range will not help you. If you are buying a RackNerd box for anything that touches email or signup verification, test the specific IP first, and be ready to move providers rather than move IPs.

At the other end, Contabo was clean on all 30. That is the easiest result to state and the most useful one if you need a mail-friendly cheap box.

The honest limits of this data

• 30 IPs per provider is a sample, not a census. A provider with a large

network has more ranges than 30 IPs can cover.

• Blocklists are dynamic. A clean result today does not promise a clean

result tomorrow — this snapshot was taken in September 2026.

• A clean blocklist does not mean ChatGPT or Claude will load. AI

services maintain their own IP reputation that public DNSBLs do not measure. That is a separate test and I cover it separately.

• PTR coverage is a proxy for "does this provider manage its address space",

not a deliverability score.

What to actually do with this

1. Before you buy, look up the specific IP you would be assigned. 2. If you are running mail, prioritise providers with high PTR coverage and low blocklist hits — BandwagonHost, Hetzner, Contabo, DMIT score well on both. 3. If you already have a box that is blocked, check whether the whole /24 is listed. If it is, changing IP is wasted effort; change provider instead.

You can check any IP here, no account needed: PureIP

The full dataset — every IP, every record, the seed and the method — is public domain (CC BY 4.0): vps-audit-2026-09.json.