AS9701 VIAWEB-AS-KR viaweb

AS9701 (VIAWEB-AS-KR) is held by Viaweb Co., Ltd. (주)비아웹, a Korean hosting company based in the Guro digital complex in Seoul. It sells domain registration, web hosting, dedicated server hosting, colocation and related IDC services. It has no relationship to the 1990s American company of the same name that became Yahoo Store.

What it's used for

The footprint is that of a small hosting provider running out of leased data-centre space rather than building its own network. RIS sees 4 IPv4 prefixes, 1,024 addresses in total, no IPv6, and a single observed neighbour. All four announcements are contiguous /24s out of one block, 103.194.252.0/24 through 103.194.255.0/24, which together form a single /22 that has simply been deaggregated for announcement. A network with one upstream and one /22 is not a carrier and is not an eyeball ISP: it is an operator that needs its own AS to hold portable address space for customer servers, and takes transit from a Korean incumbent to get it on the internet. The 103.x range is a later APNIC allocation, so the address space is newer than the ASN.

Notable

• Viaweb's product mix (shared web hosting, server hosting, colocation, SSL certificates, shopping-mall packages) is typical of the long tail of Korean hosting SMEs that resell rack space inside third-party IDCs.
• The name is a genuine collision hazard: searching for "Viaweb" surfaces the Paul Graham startup acquired by Yahoo in 1998. This AS is an unrelated Korean company.