The Difference between Shared IP Addresses and Dedicated IP Addresses

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. There are billions of addresses possible, however, the number is finite.

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. Whether you type in your URL or the numeric form of its IP address, both will bring you to the same domain.
• Shared IP address means that multiple websites share the same address. Web servers can determine by the domain entered in a user's browser which website is being requested. Typing in the IP address will bring you to some kind of generic page instead of the specific site you want.

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. In fact, hundreds of websites often share the same address. 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.

Dedicated IP and Search Engines

There are some well-known debate in SEO industry about whether we need to provide a dedicated IP for your web site, and part of them is true before but not right now, and part of them are still applicable now.

• People might say a web site with dedicated IP can perform better in SEO than shared IP web site. This might be true before, but based on latest research, there should be no impact. 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.

Conclusion

According to the discussion above, in most cases, you won't need a dedicated IP. But it will be required if you want to have some sort of special access to your web site, like SSL or Anonymous FTP. And for almost all the e-Commerce web site which need to accept Credit Card online, dedicated IP is required.

The cost of dedicated IP is very low, it won't cause you more than $2 per month and you can go for it if you want. IX Web Hosting is a very special web hosting service provider which is famous for including huge disk space, huge bandwidth and 8 free dedicated IP in its "One-for-All" web hosting solution. It's also one of my favorite web hosting companies which I would like to recommend frequently.