AS8972 GD-EMEA-DC-SXB1

GD-EMEA-DC-SXB1 is held by Host Europe GmbH of Cologne, the German web-hosting business now owned by GoDaddy — the handle is GoDaddy's own naming for its EMEA datacentre estate, and the AS is maintained under GODADDY-MNT.

What it's used for

• Shared hosting, virtual private servers and dedicated servers. The rDNS is uniform and first-party across the estate: ds62-138-154-1.dedicated.hosteurope.de for dedicated machines, and lvps…, wvps…, pvcl… prefixed names for the various virtual-server product lines, all under dedicated.hosteurope.de.
• Roughly 103,000 IPv4 addresses across ~120 prefixes, plus several IPv6 blocks.

Notable

• The inventory is highly fragmented — over a hundred prefixes, many of them /24s — which is the accumulation pattern of a hosting company that has bought up address space and absorbed other providers over two decades, not a broker shape: the blocks are registered to Host Europe / GoDaddy and carry first-party rDNS.
• Only one observed BGP neighbour. This AS sits behind GoDaddy's own upstream rather than peering on its own account.
• Being a mass-market hosting network, the addresses carry customer-run websites and servers. They are datacentre space and must not be read as residential.

Interesting

• Host Europe was one of Germany's original web hosts and later the parent of the Host Europe Group, which owned brands including 123-reg and Heart Internet before GoDaddy acquired the group in 2017. The AS number and much of the address space predate all of that.