Member Avatar for Spycat

Hi all,

This gets a bit involved, so please bear with me :icon_confused:
I have owned the domain for over 9 years now.
For several of those years, I registered and had it hosted by services located in the USA.
However, at one renewal period, I switched it to a registrar and host located in the Philippines. I kept it there one year.
An oversight on my part witnessed my failing to renew my domain.
Thus, went into a "Redemption Period".
To get my domain back, I had to pay around $150 USD.
While I am admitting that failure to renew was ultimately my fault, I felt my registrar could have e-mailed me to give me a warning.

I realized that trying to save a few dollars by going with a Filipino registrar and host had ironically wound up costing me far more, so I switched my registrar to GoDaddy and my hosting service to another domestic firm, hgpowerhosting.com.

OK, now to the crux of my problem.
Even tho I switched to GoDaddy and HG Powerhosting around 2 years ago, most of my page hits come from the Philippines.
I am wondering if there might be some designator...somewhere that indicates that this domain is located in the Philippines. I have looked at Godaddy's and my host's config files and saw nothing that would indicate that.
I even tried for a time adding the Meta Tag: <meta name="country" content="USA" /> but that didn't result in any change in visitor's being primarily from the Philippines.

So...does anyone have any clues as to why this might be?
Perhaps it is coincidental, but it just seems like such an oddity that the majority of my visitors would not be from the USA.

Sooo...help? :?:

Thanks,
Rick

Edited by Spycat because: n/a
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Dani AI

Generated

Quick answer: where a domain is registered or who the registrar is does not force visitor geography. Browsers and analytics map the visitor IP to a country (GeoIP), and DNS/A records determine which server actually serves your pages — not the registrar. As noted, many of the 300+ “hits” you saw can be crawlers, bots or referral/ghost spam rather than real human visitors. ()

Practical checks (in this order):

  • Compare your analytics with the raw server access log — the log is the ground truth for IPs.
  • Pull the top client IPs from the log and GeoIP them, then WHOIS those IPs (RIR data) to see the network owner and region.
  • Check DNS/A records and traceroute to verify where the domain currently resolves and how traffic routes.

Example commands (replace placeholders):

# top IPs from an Apache/Nginx combined log
awk '{print $1}' /path/to/access.log | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head

# DNS, traceroute and IP whois
dig +short yourdomain.tld A
traceroute yourdomain.tld
whois <IP-from-dig-or-log>

Server logs and RIR/WHOIS lookups are the reliable sources for who’s connecting and which ASN/netblock owns the IP space. (docs.nxlog.co)

Why you might see “Philippines” in reports:

  • GeoIP databases are not perfect; country-level matches are very accurate but not infallible, and VPNs/proxies/CDNs can mask real user locations. (support.maxmind.com)
  • Referral/ghost spam and automated crawlers often skew small-site stats. Verify suspicious user‑agents, hostnames and missing session identifiers before treating those visits as people. Also validate search‑engine crawlers by reverse DNS when needed. (developers.google.com)

Quick final tips: rely on server logs to confirm real traffic, filter known bots/hostnames in your analytics, avoid blunt IP-range blocks (they can block legitimate users and search engines), and use DNS-history services if you suspect old DNS entries or hijacks. If needed, ask your host for raw logs and a short traceroute while you reproduce a hit — that will usually show what's happening. (recordedfuture.com)

Recommended Answers

All 5 Replies

Member Avatar for Spycat

So...over 350 people have read this in the last month, and not a single one of them has any possible answers/theories/clues?

Member Avatar for sknake

Search engine crawlers come across this page and it increases the view count. They also periodically check back hourly, daily, weekly, etc depending on how often the page is updated.

It is likely that only a handful of the 350 people were human

Member Avatar for Spycat

Thanks sknake.
Yeah, I forgot to account for the fact that search robots would account for some hits.

Oh well, I will just take it that no one knows the answer to my question, seeing that I posted it a month ago.

Member Avatar for sknake

What does it matter? Internet traffic can come from anywhere. I have had apexsoftware.com registered with Network Solutions since it was purchased in the 90s and I get a ton of traffic from India. There is nothing associated with this domain except US information and registrars.

It doesn't matter. If you don't want the traffic then drop APNIC ip blocks at your router (this will hurt your search engine rankings, though).

Member Avatar for Spycat

OK, I just found it curious that the majority of my traffic should suddenly go from the USA to the Philippines, given the succession of events I recounted in my original post.
Nevermind.

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