Is it possible that the server location of my hosting does not match the IP location?

Question

I have hosting hired with a2hosting with the data center of Amsterdam, Europe. On their website they state that those centers have the following IPs:

• USA-Michigan Data Center: 75.98.175.109
• USA-Arizona Data Center: 68.66.224.6
• Europe-Amsterdam Data Center: 209.124.66.5
• Asia-Singapore Data Center: 103.227.176.4

I asked the support to confirm if it is in Amsterdam as my IP points to USA Arizona 68.66.224.6 and they told me the following:

Your server is located in Amsterdam. The nl1 part of your server name nl1-lr1.supercp.com refers to the Netherland datacenter. Our IP's, however, do not have Geo Location so they all show where they are registered. We are based out of Michigan and so the registration shows there but your Server is certainly in Europe.

Recently a problem in their american servers took down my websites which I thought shouldn't be possible. Is it possible that the server location of my hosting does not match the IP location?

Answer 1

The reported GEO-location of any IP address can certainly be "incorrect" - in that it's not actually reporting the true GEO-location of the machine that the IP is assigned to.

What "support" is telling you does hold up...

Yes, when I go to dnschecker.org/#A/... with one of my domains it says so.

Actually, no it doesn't. Whilst the IP address that your domain points to is in the same IP block as the "USA-Arizona Data Center", it is pointing to a different IP address. And this IP address does appear to be pointing to Amsterdam. (They no doubt have many IP addresses pointing to the Amsterdam Data Center - depending on the number of servers they have - and these could be distributed across any of the IP blocks that they manage. This is entirely up to them.)

Doing a traceroute on this IP address reports the following: [end-point redacted]

:
10    15 ms    15 ms    15 ms  if-ae-14-2.tcore2.av2-amsterdam.as6453.net [80.231.131.161]
11    21 ms    16 ms    17 ms  if-ae-11-2.tcore1.ad1-amsterdam.as6453.net [80.231.152.26]
12    15 ms    15 ms    15 ms  if-ae-6-2.thar1.hnn-haarlem.as6453.net [80.231.205.5]
13    14 ms    15 ms    14 ms  195.219.162.41   <- "Netherlands"
14    24 ms    14 ms    15 ms  205.147.94.171
15    22 ms    22 ms    21 ms  <HOSTNAME-REDACTED> [<IP-REDACTED>]

Whereas, the published IP address of the "USA-Arizona Data Center" (in the same IP block) does suggest Arizona:

:
14   130 ms   130 ms   129 ms  be2927.ccr21.elp01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.29.222]
15   138 ms   138 ms   138 ms  be2929.ccr31.phx01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.42.65]
16   132 ms   131 ms   131 ms  be3407.rcr21.b023003-0.phx01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.28.142]
17   138 ms   139 ms   139 ms  38.142.106.98
18   138 ms   138 ms   137 ms  az1-ls1.a2hosting.com [68.66.224.6]

Recently a problem in their american servers took down my websites which I thought shouldn't be possible.

It's not clear why that would be. Your DNS appears to be handled by Cloudflare and everything else appears to be pointing to your "Amsterdam" server?