Shared or Dedicated IP Address

I believe it is an absolute must, definitely. You don’t want to be sharing an IP due to the following reasons:

1) IP could have been previously blacklisted by Google or another search engine.
2) Potential to get blacklisted in the future after you’ve spent a lot of time SEO’ing your site.
3) Hide your sites from competition. If you host multiple sites on one IP, it is very easy for your competition to reverse-lookup that IP and find all of your sites.

I’m sure there are other reasons that I can’t think of immediately.

How many sites would you put under one dedicated IP? There is this old SEO myth that one should not cross link from same IP, but then it is a myth, except that once you have a network under one IP, it will be penalized at some point. Plus who knows in the future google may look at that.

So how does running a network under a dedicated IP versus different c-block IP addresses compare?

I would say yes, it is a must. You don’t want to get grouped in with someone else and have them get you blacklisted.

It might even be a good idea to have your sites spread out over a few IP addresses. Not to say that you would do anything black hat like, but just in case you ever decided to walk the line, you wouldn’t want all of your sites to get banned.

I’ll take the other side. Personally, I don’t think it matters. Google’s algorithm has gotten more sophisticated and they aren’t likely to penalize you for another bad actor on a shared server. This used to be an issue with Google, but they are smart enough to know what a shared server is and that there are several webmasters running sites from the same server.

I agree with Webber. Although Google still makes plenty of mistakes, they are in tune with the issues of multiple sites at a single IP address. Although Google still records information by IP Address, I believe that they use TLD as a key, and not IP, these days, especially since people move to different hosting systems, more than they change Email Addresses. IMO, the cost for paying for a dedicated IP address, may not be worth the extra cash.

If you are still concerned, another laborious task you can do, to check things out first, is to ask your hosting company to tell you which Class C block they are planning on putting you under (in the shared environment). You can then TRACEROUTE or BROWSE each of the 255 potential IP addresses under that class C, to see if there are any “shady” sites there. Of course, this method will not reveal any “past” sites that were hosted under the Class C, and will only reveal the current state of affairs.

I agree that shared versus dedicated does not make much difference, many say it does but proof is results. I have a very good friend that does SEO and has had some very successfully sites on shared hosting, but recently he rolled out two new sites, and convinced he was not ranking very well moved them to dedicated, after a year he has not seen any big improvement or difference.

If I had the money I might change to dedicated just because maybe better response times, etc but I believe shared is just as good, especially if you are on a budget. ” title=”” class=”bbcode_smiley” />

Rod