What is a dedicated IP address? Advantages of a dedicated IP for your website |
  (No Ratings Yet) Loading ... |
There are some advantages to having your website on a dedicated IP address, but does the need to have an IP justify the extra $1.00-$2.00 per month to have one? Some websites are perfectly fine on a shared IP address, however there some occasions when it is a good idea to have one. In this article on the RSC Web Hosting Blog, I will discuss dedicated IPs and will help you decide if you should pay the extra money to have one.
Websites that will need a dedicated IP:
Anonymous FTP enabled websites - A dedicated IP is required if you want to allow your web site visitors to download files from your FTP server anonymously. Websites that use anonymous FTP are typically file sharing websites or big mirror download sites. This does not mean you need a dedicated IP to FTP files from a server through a username and password, but if you want your visitors to access files from ftp://yoursite.com/file.zip WITHOUT having to login, get the IP.
E-commerce Websites - If you ever want to accept credit cards on your website, you will need a secure connection to do it. Your site will need a SSL cert which requires your site to be on a dedicated IP to work. So if you plan to accept credit cards through your website at any point, pay the extra monthly fee for the IP. By installing a SSL cert, you can redirect visitors to the secure connection for your site by having them forwarded to https://yoursite.com/url/for/order/page.
Reseller Hosting Accounts - If you ever want to have your own custom name servers: IE ns1.yoursite.com + ns2.yoursite.com, you will need 2 dedicated IPs - one for each name server. Some resellers like to have their own name servers so that they are less transparent to their reseller hosting company. If you are trying to sell web hosting, ns1.yoursite.com + ns2.yoursite.com looks much better than telling your clients to use ns1.YourResellerHost.com ns2.YourResellerHost.com
Advantages of a dedicated IP for SEO
Some say that putting your site on a dedicated IP will give you a boost in search engine ranking results for that particular website. I do not agree with this.
If you have one website, a dedicated IP will not rank you higher in the search engines. BUT, if you have a multiple websites, it is to your advantage to put each of these on a different IP because the search engine is less likely to connect your websites together. Here is an example to help you understand this better:
You have 4 websites and you want to make a 5th. Your 4 websites are ranked but are all on the same IP address. You place a link on each of your 4 websites to your 5th in order to pass on rank value to the 5th. The search engine will see that your new site has links from 4 websites. When it goes to check the IPs for the sites linking to the 5th, it will find that they are all hosted on the same server because the IP addresses are the same. The search engine will assign less rank value to the 5th site because it knows that the 4 sites linking to it are all related/owned by the same person. If you put each site on a different IP, it will ‘think’ the sites are totally unrelated therefore assigning more link value to those links.
Dedicated IP for email myth
Some people think by signing up for a dedicated IP the email for the website will be sent through a different IP. This is not true. Most hosts have their email server setup to send all email through one IP address. This can cause problems sometimes because eventually one of these emails will be flagged as SPAM which will end up getting that IP address black listed. Unfortunately there is nothing you can do aside from getting your own dedicated email server. Sometimes that isn’t enough either because these SPAM blacklists will sometimes black list a whole netblock if SPAM comes from any of the IPs on it. So basically one bad server in a group will get the other servers blacklisted as well even though they are totally unrelated.
Posts
Aug 11th, 2008 at 8:41 pm
Also in terms of SEO Google has a tendency to prefer websites that have dedicated IP addresses, so depending on the purpose of the site it might be necessary for marketing.
Aug 22nd, 2008 at 9:52 am
Another SEO benefit of having a dedicated IP is the clean environment for your website, when using shared IP there is a possibility that you are sharing the same IP with hundreds of spammers, some search engines will penalize the whole IP in case they found hundreds of spammy website using the same IP.
Finally here is a MSN modifier that show with how your are sharing your IP, go to MSN and type in the search box:
ip:your-site-ip
Sep 30th, 2008 at 12:41 am
Dedicated can be good, but its getting very hard to get legitimate emails delivered due to heavy filtering by ISPs due to all the spam out there unfortunately. I don’t even require email validation on my forum because so many people never get the emails…
Dec 5th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
having a dedicated ip also means you can run your own nameserver and host as many domains as necesary, as well as your own SMTP server. To be honest I can’t think of not using one….
Mar 1st, 2009 at 11:56 am
“The search engine will assign less rank value to the 5th site because it knows that the 4 sites linking to it are all related/owned by the same person.”
Thank you. It ’s clear for me to choose Dedicated IP, I plan to have many domain.
Mar 30th, 2009 at 8:27 am
I have only two domains hosted on a same web hosting account. I am confused about whether I really need the dedicated IP for SEO or not?
Both of my sites link to each other and have the same page rank. I will be glad if you please help.
Mar 30th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
Hello Adstiger,
If your two sites are linked together it doesn’t really matter at that point. Its probably that google has already concluded that the two sites are somehow related or ran by the same person - since they link together and are from the same server.
However, I don’t believe this will effect your search engine ranking or the amount of traffic they send you. If the two sites you link together are related in niche, it will help you if anything.