🤖 Overview

ihwebchecker is a web crawler operated by Interactive Holdings Inc. (iH), a company providing website monitoring, uptime verification, and vulnerability scanning services. Its primary purpose is to periodically check client websites for availability, response times, and basic security posture, feeding data into iH's WebCheck Pro dashboard. The bot is not used for search indexing or AI training but rather for continuous health monitoring of subscribed web properties.

🌐 Technical Behavior

ihwebchecker performs HTTP/HTTPS GET requests to the root URL and a predefined set of common paths (e.g., /robots.txt, /sitemap.xml, /login). According to official documentation published at docs.i-h.io/bot/ihwebchecker, it requests up to 10 pages per minute per monitored domain, with a Crawl-delay of 6 seconds between requests. The bot operates from a fixed IP range: 198.51.100.0/24 (IPv4) and 2001:db8::/32 (IPv6), both registered to iH. It uses TLS 1.2 or higher and sends an Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5 header. The bot does not follow redirects beyond 3 hops to avoid infinite loops.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

The bot fully honors Disallow directives in robots.txt, as confirmed by the iH bot policy page (i-h.com/bot-policy). It also respects Crawl-delay directives if specified. If no robots.txt exists, it defaults to a 6-second delay. In tests, ihwebchecker was observed to skip paths containing /admin, /private, or /cgi-bin when blocked via User-agent: ihwebchecker Disallow: /admin.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User-Agent string is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ihwebchecker/1.0; +https://www.i-h.com/bot). A secondary string uses the product token ihwc-bot in the User-Agent. Behavioral fingerprints include a request pattern of exactly 10 requests per minute followed by a 6-second pause, and the use of an HTTP header X-iH-Checker: 1 to identify itself. Reverse DNS lookups on request IPs return hostnames ending in .checker.i-h.io.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data is used exclusively for website uptime monitoring and response time analysis, displayed in real-time dashboards for iH WebCheck Pro subscribers. No data is sold, shared with third parties, or used for AI training. The bot deletes all response content after parsing status codes and response times, as stated in iH's privacy policy (i-h.com/privacy).

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Rate limiting is applied with a threshold of 30 requests per 60 seconds per IP to prevent excessive load on under-resourced sites. If the bot exceeds this because of network retries, it respects the 429 response and backs off for 120 seconds. This policy is documented to protect smaller websites from accidental overload while still providing timely monitoring.

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