I've been doing some research to see who really 'powers' the most popular VPN companies which has involved a ton of reverse IP lookups and traceroutes. One thing I keep running in to though is that some servers will have a hostname of of 123.4.56.789.sea.datapacket.com but their AS comes back as Datacamp Limited. A quick glance at their respective websites suggests they are two entirely different entities. Or in some cases I get multiple ASNs back. Other companies I see this happening with are CDN77,DataCamp Limited, CDNext, and LogicWeb. Really struggling figuring who is who.
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2There really isn't a relationship between the two. Companies can use whatever domain name they want. But questions about networks you don't control are off topic here.– Ron TrunkNov 9, 2022 at 16:10
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2 Answers
Consider a large hosting company like AWS. They actually use multiple ASNs but for simplicity, imagine they use one specifically for hosting servers for end users. Of the millions of IP addresses they have in use on that ASN, each IP address may also host thousands of web sites given that a server can host more than one website/domain name combo.
Each of those IP addresses should have a single associated PTR record in DNS to establish a hostname for the IP address and usually you want that PTR to match the forward lookup of the server name so if a customer has an account on AWS with a server that they use for hosting their website, www.madeupcompanyexample.com, they want the PTR for the IP address to match to a large degree and might have it set to web1.madeupcompanyexample.com or similar.
This is one reason why any given IP address might and probably will have a PTR DNS entry that is no the same or even similar to the company that actually owns/manages the ASN where the IP address is registered to be reachable.
How can a hostname and ASN be different?
There's really no (required) relation between those two.
Host names within an AS may relate to the company running it but they might not just as well. And any company may deploy any number of 'brands' on the market, but networks not under your control and speculation are off topic here.
