Why Your Website Should Have Its Own IP Address

When you buy a shared hosting plan, chances are you’ll get a shared IP address. This means that the IP address of your website is also used other websites on the same server.

The same thing can be true for a dedicated server also. If you’re hosting more than one website on your server, it’s also possible that it’s using a shared IP address too.

While it’s not critical that every website have their own dedicated IP address, there are some cases for which it is. There are two main reasons for which you want to have a dedicated IP address (other than for SSL purposes): search engine rankings and privacy.

There have been a lot of debating whether Google penalizes websites using a shared IP address. In an interview with Google’s Director of Technology, Craig Silverstein, it was said that virtually hosted domains and their links were handled just the same way as domains on unique IP addresses.

While this might be true, the issue is that using a shared IP address expose you to being banned from different online services (email servers, search engines, etc.) if your website resides with “bad neighborhood”. For instance, what happens if your site is hosted on the same IP address as 500 spam sites?

Now don’t get me wrong, you may also get a unique IP that already has a bad history.

The other reason why you might want to have a dedicated IP address is online privacy. If you own several websites on a shared IP address, your competitors can easily perform a nameserver lookup and find all of them. In some cases it doesn’t matter, but there might be some reasons you don’t want everybody to know every websites you own.

How To Get a Dedicated IP Address

There are some web hosts who will provide you with a dedicated IP by default but it’s rarely the case. Just contact your webhost’s sales department and they’ll provide you with details on buying a dedicated IP. Usually, the price range goes from about $2.00 to $4.00 a month.

If you have a dedicated server, you might have got multiple IP addresses already. You now need to assign them to your website(s).

But that’s for another post…

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