Virtual & Dedicated IPs - A Further Look...

• Sep. 11, 2003

With todays article, I am going to revisit IPs (Virtual and Dedicated IPs). I briefly touched on IPs in this weeks article ‘Total cost of website ownership - Web Hosting’. This will continue from where I left off. It is important that you understand the two and what your site exactly needs.

A virtual IP is an IP address that is shared by other sites and a dedicated IP is an IP address with only one site.

Not all web hosting companies can afford to offer a dedicated IP for every website, plus it does cut down on cost having multiple websites on the same IP address. It is actually common for many websites to be on a shared IP, but there are advantages to having your own dedicated IP address.

With shared IPs, if a website is spamming, then this runs the risk of having the other websites on the same IP to being banned as well. That is if the actual IP address is banned in the search engines. If you just have a family or a personal website, then having a shared IP will be ok as you are not marketing your website for a certain product or service. But, if you have a website for marketing your products or services, then I would seriously consider looking into getting a dedicated IP address. There have been many cases where the only problem a website was having been on a shared IP address, and switching over to a dedicated IP helped the site gain back its rankings in the search engines.

Something else to be aware of with IPs is that websites that spam heavily in the past can lead to some c-blocks being tainted. With this in mind, if you have several websites, it would be a good idea to have several different web hosting companies, or see if your current web host has different ranges of IPs that they could spread your sites over. If there happens to be a problem with the IP for some reason, then you do not risk loosing all your rankings in the search engine.

If you decide that you are going to switch hosting companies, please read our article on Changing Hosting - Server Issues which could affect SE rankings. This will give you some great tips on what you should know and do if you decide to change hosting companies.

Gerard Manning
Searchengineposition, Inc.
Search engine marketing company