AS8391 KNIPP-AS Knipp Medien und Kommunikation GmbH

KNIPP-AS belongs to Knipp Medien und Kommunikation GmbH of Dortmund, a German

company best known for building and running **domain-registry and registrar

systems**. The AS carries Knipp's hosting and service platforms.

What it's used for

• Hosting and managed services for Knipp's customers. Reverse DNS is dense with per-customer service names under knipp.de, including virtual-machine and platform hosts, and the naming shows separate customer estates rather than a single flat network.
• Registry and DNS infrastructure. Knipp's business is the software and operations behind top-level-domain registries and registrar systems, so a good deal of what it announces is DNS-adjacent service platform.

Notable

• A hosting and services network, not an access provider. Roughly 50,000 IPv4 addresses, most of it three contiguous /18s in 195.253.0.0 space, plus a set of /24s and an IPv6 /32. Over a hundred BGP peers for a network this size, which suits a company running DNS services that want to be reachable everywhere.
• Part of the space carries reverse DNS under dokom21.de, the Dortmund regional carrier, so some of the addressing is shared with or delegated to that neighbouring network. Don't read every address in the AS as Knipp's own.

Interesting

• The kind of network that is invisible to end users but sits under things they use constantly. Registry back-end operators are a small club, and their networks are small, old, well-peered, and carry far more importance than their address count suggests.