If you’re a client:
You should be aware of what kind of IPs your provider has given you. If these IPs are blacklisted in several places, it could potentially end up hurting your business.
If your shared hosting account, VPS, or dedicated server IPs are blacklisted, then some of your clients may not receive your emails. Furthermore, your SEO ranking may have to suffer as well if your IPs are marked as having malware/spam on them.
But what can you do about it? You could contact your provider and ask them to either clean up these IPs as soon as possible, or assign you a new batch of IPs which is already clean. Either way, you should not settle for blacklisted IPs. Another alternative would be for you to try to clean these IPs yourself by asking for delisting from the blacklists they are listed on, although this would rather fall under your provider’s duties, even if it’s an unmanaged service, since it’s their network and they should make sure it’s clean and fully operational. Besides, some blacklists don’t even consider your delisting request unless you are the IP owner, which in this case would be your provider, not you.
All in all, you should always be aware if your IPs are clean or not, as to avoid unnecessary headaches and complaining users/clients.
If you’re a provider:
A provider should always monitor their IPs for blacklisting. Why? Well, for one, it can greatly hurt your reputation if you assign a new client a batch of dirty blacklisted IPs. This client, when finding out, can usually be very disappointed in your services and can take his business elsewhere, leaving behind a bad review for your services as well.
Another reason would be to constantly know which bad clients on your network are causing trouble. By constantly monitoring your IPs, you can instantly know if any of your clients has been compromised or starts sending spam, so you can take immediate action and fix the issue before the IPs get blacklisted on countless RBLs.
If any of your IPs get suddenly blacklisted, then it surely isn’t a good sign and you should immediately look into why that is. It could be an abusing client sending out spam, hosting malware, or it could be a compromised shared account, VPS, dedicated server, etc., doing the same thing. The point is, you’ll need to take immediate action in order to limit the damage this could cause to your network’s reputation.
Monitoring your IPs would also greatly help for when new clients come in, so you can assign them clean IPs and keep them happy, knowing your network’s reputation is very good.
It’s never too late to start monitoring your network, keep the clean IPs clean, get rid of the bad clients who spam and host malware, and start cleaning the blacklisted IPs.