Myips.ms is a popular web service which can be used for multiple purposes.
By default if you enter the myip.ms website you’ll see your own IP address along with some information: the name of your ISP, your status in the global blacklist of IP addresses (no reason why you should be blacklisted), your location, your browser and your OS, as well as your browser agent. That can be useful if you need some of the info.
Get an estimate of a website’s daily traffic with myip.ms
It gets more interesting if you type the URL of a website into the Whoislookup field.
Let’s type Facebook.com for instance.
How does myip.ms estimate the daily traffic of a website?
As you can see at the top right of the page, just under the date of the query, Facebook is ranked #7 in world sites rating. What is that ranking? It’s based on Alexa.com (an Amazon company, now retired).
If we scroll down, we’ll see a graph labelled Alexa. If we click on the graph, it brings us to Alexa.com.
There is sometimes a little difference in rankings since myip.ms caches the most popular queries. If you’re a premium Alexa user, you can get access to the traffic estimates for each site. Bases on those figures (which they probably retrieve via an API call), myip.ms gives us the result we saw earlier. So basically using myip.ms is a great way to get for free the estimates you’d need to pay if you were just using Alexa. Nice hack.
How do myip.ms estimates compare with Similarweb?
Most of the time, for the most popular websites (let’s say for the 50,000 most popular sites in the world according to Alexa), traffic estimates will be quite similar between myip.ms / Alexa numbers and the ones you’ll see on Similarweb. But there can be significant discrepancies.
For instance Similarweb estimates that Facebook.com receives the equivalent of 866M “visits” per day whereas myip.ms tells you there are approximately 400M “visitors” per day. Of course visits could be sessions and visitors daily uniques… which could explain the difference. You’ve got to compare apples and apples.
What else can you learn from myip.ms?
At the bottom of the results you can see which other websites are hosted on the same IP or within the same IP range. As far as Facebook.com is concerned you can see that the same IP also handles fb.com, fb.me, fbcdn.net and, for some reason, 112nissewaard.nl
In some cases this information will help you find other websites developed and hosted by a company you’re researching. This can be valuable in terms of competitive intelligence.
If you’re researching your own website you can also see other sites hosted on the same server or at least registered on the same IP by your registrar.
I wrote in another article that myip.ms is also very useful to get a list of the most popular websites using Shopify (since they’re linked to Shopify’s main IP address).
How is myip.ms ranked by myip.ms?
Let’s perform a loop search 😉
65,000 visitors per day, pretty nice. Ranked #12633 on Alexa. And, interestingly, the main organic keyword driving traffic to myip.ms includes “Shopify”.
Did you know how you could use myip.ms? Any questions? Leave a comment below.