Auditing which account answers on which address

You bought distinct addresses so your sites would not resolve back to one another. That only holds if each site is actually assigned the address you think it has. Auditing that takes a few minutes and it is the single most useful hygiene check on a diverse-IP network.

Why the map drifts

Nothing dramatic causes it. An account gets rebuilt during a support conversation and comes back on the shared address. A site is added as an alias under an existing account instead of getting its own, because that was quicker on the day. A migration lands three sites into one account by accident. None of these produce an error, and every one of them silently collapses two footprints into one.

The audit, from the top down

1. List every account with its address. WHM shows this on one screen. Export or copy it somewhere you can sort.
2. Sort by address. Any address appearing twice is either deliberate or a mistake, and you should know which.
3. Count domains per account. An account holding more domains than you expected is where sites quietly ended up sharing.
4. Check the third octet across the list. On a Class C network the octet that must differ is the third. Two sites on addresses differing only in the last number are on the same block.

Then verify from outside

The panel tells you what is configured. It does not tell you what the world sees, and those differ whenever DNS is stale, a proxy sits in front, or the domain never actually pointed here.

dig +short site-one.com
dig +short site-two.com
dig +short ns1.site-one.com

Run it for every domain and compare against your list. Three failure modes turn up:

• Resolves to an address that is not yours at all: the domain still points at the old host.
• Resolves to one shared address for several sites: either they are genuinely on one account, or a proxy is in front of all of them and the diversity you paid for is invisible from outside.
• Nameservers do not match the site: private nameservers were configured on the server but never set at the registrar, so every domain still announces someone else's.

That third one is common and it is the most damaging, because the nameserver record is public and groups your sites in a single lookup no matter how well the addresses are separated. If it applies, see Nameservers and DNS.

What to do with what you find

• Two sites sharing an address on purpose: fine, as long as it was a decision. Write it down.
• Two sites sharing by accident: give one its own address. This is an assignment change plus a DNS update, not a migration.
• An account with no dedicated address: assign one. Every site on this platform can have its own non-consecutive address.
• A domain pointing elsewhere: the site is not hosted where you think it is. Resolve that before anything else.

Make it a habit, not a project

Run the audit after any batch of changes: a migration, a set of new sites, an incident where accounts were rebuilt. Those are the moments the map drifts, and catching it the same week costs nothing while catching it a year later means untangling live sites.

The account listing interface is documented at docs.cpanel.net. For what address separation does and does not buy you, see IP diversity and footprint.