Dedicated IP or Shared IP Address For SEO and Web hosting

When you sign up for a new web host, good web host offers you whether you want to host you website on a shared IP or a dedicated IP. Shared IP means, many website share same IP. Several hundred website can be hosted on a same IP address. Many countries such as China use IP address to block a website. If they want to block a website which uses a shared IP address and if this IP address is blocked then all the websites hosted on the shared IP address will be blocked. For  example, blogger is not allowed in china and China use IP address to block blogger. All the blogs hosted on blogger use a shared IP address so in China blogger can’t be opened.

Dedicated IP address on the other hand is completely a different thing. Dedicated IP address means that the IP address is completely dedicated to a website and only that website is hosted on the IP address. So dedicated IP address is more secure and trustworthy. If you get a dedicated IP, blocking of shared IP address won’t affect your website. Webhost may charge extra bucks to host your website on a dedicated IP address. But there are few hosts that give a dedicated IP address for free.

The another disadvantage of shared IP address is that if one of the websites shared on same IP address as your website and get attacked by a malware then certain antivirus may also falsely tag your website as dangerous. Getting a dedicated IP address minimizes this problem.

SSL certificates.

It is better to use SSL certificates on dedicated IP address as on shared IP address SSL encryption don’t work in old browsers.

Effect of Shared and Dedicated IP address on SEO

Let us now discuss the Google’s point of view on shared and dedicated IP addresses. Google is the most important and search engine and every one wants to optimize his site for Google. According to a Google Representative,  shared IP addresses won’t affect the page rank and google and search results positioning. But if too many spammy and low quality sites are hosted on the same IP address then this may have negative affects on your SEO and your site may lose its SEO potential. 

Thus from the above discussion we may conclude that getting a dedicated IP address is good practice and superior to shared IP address. But having a shared IP address is not a big problem as thousands of websites are currently hosted on shared IP addresses.