IX Web Hosting - Dedicated Ip or Shared Ip

An IP address is a 32-bit numeric address usually expressed as 4 numbers from 0-255 separated by dots, for example 192.168.0.123. Each computer connected to the Internet is assigned a unique IP Address for the purposes of communication. In the Web hosting industry there are two types of IP address:

Dedicated IP address (also call Static IP) means that a website has its own IP address.

Shared IP address means that multiple websites share the same address.   Due to the rapid increase of the number of registered domain names and the finite number of IP addresses, Web hosting providers are forced to use shared IP’s when possible. Dedicated IP hosting is no longer the norm and usually costs more.

Who Needs a Dedicated IP Address

Generally, having a website on a shared IP address will not cause you any harm. However, there are a few cases when a dedicated IP is required:

SSL certificate: SSL is needed in e-commerce website for accepting credit cards online, and data will be encrypted and transferred between web server and visitor’s browser. Since the SSL protocal/encryption happens before the exchange of the HTTP header and it uses IP to identify the web site. So, in order o install a SSL certificate onto a web site or domain, the domain must be configured with a dedicated IP.

Anonymous FTP: Anonymous FTP is used to let visitors download files from web server through FTP without having to provide user name & password. In order to enable the anonymous FTP, the domain must be configured with a dedicated IP.   People might say a web site with dedicated IP can perform better in SEO than shared IP web site. As you know, Search Engine consider more and more on the content of the web site, dedicated IP or not dedicated IP is really not important to them.

Dedicated IP might protect you from being banned by Search Engine. This might sound correct since if a site scam the search engine, search engine might punish the site by banning all the request from that IP, so that all the web site with same IP will not work in the search engine. But right now, the majority of sites on the Web are hosted via shared IP, it would be unprofitable to search engines to penalize a site based on IP. So, search engines are able to ban anything on a domain name instead of an entire IP neighborhood and your web site will be in safe. Here, I would like to recommend a very good web hosting company which will offer dedicated IP with no extra fee. It’s IX Web Hosting. IX Web Hosting is one of my favorite web hosting companies since in it’s web hosting plan, you will only find the items required for hosting.