Why is it beneficial to have a dedicated IP address?

When it comes to hosting a website on a shared server, there is always quite a common controversial issue: Is it necessary to have a dedicated IP address for your website and why, if you just can use a shared one? Using dedicated IP address provides with certain crucial advantages, but let’s start with the definition first.

What is Dedicated IP Address?

IP stands for Internet Protocol and is defined as unique address assigned to each computer that is connected to a certain network. Internet Protocol address plays the role of unique identifier that is used to provide actual location of a machine or a website in a given network.

What is the difference between Shared and Dedicated IP address?

The difference between shared and dedicated IP addresses is quite simple. Shared IP address is a single address that is used by multiple websites within one web-server. In this case web-server should do some extra work, parsing user’s request to the correct website. Having Dedicated IP address means that the website has its very own address and you can use whether this IP address or domain name of your website to access it from the Web. For more illustrative example, please check the diagram below:

Why having dedicated IP address is beneficial?

There are a lot of reasons why it is recommended to use Dedicated IP address for a website, hosted on a Shared server, but we shall look through the main ones here:

• It provides a higher stability

The fact that multiple websites share single IP address on the Web gives a clear picture about difficulties that may appear with a separate website. Just imagine that one of the websites hosted on a Shared server as well as yours, was suddenly flagged as a malicious one or the actual IP address of the server was blacklisted due to possible spamming activity of one of the users. Unfortunately there is a possibility that your website would suffer the consequences as well, however dedicated IP address will allow to control reputation of the website on your own in this case, and it won’t be affected by the others activity.

• It grants access to your website anytime you need

Sometimes it is quite necessary to check how website is going to look before pointing domain name to the server and launching your website on the web. Dedicated IP address will provide with ability to access server directly without changing DNS settings for the domain name.

• It is beneficial for email sender’s reputation

As it was already mentioned above, having your website run over a single IP address may cause unpredictable difficulties and email service may also be affected in this case. There are some situations when some user, sharing the same IP address with you gets banned or blacklisted for spamming which may possibly affect your email service as well. Using dedicated IP address for email, isolates your service from being affected by consequences of abuses made by others.

• It is good for a business identity

If you are going to host your own online-store or other e-commerce related website, and you are not going to use some additional third-party services for handling payments, it is quite necessary to grab some Dedicated IP address and SSL certificate for the website, in order to provide security for your customer’s data. Customers will feel more safe making transactions on the website which uses dedicated IP address.

• It is required for particular third-party applications/scripts

Sometimes a particular application or a script that you may wish to run on your server, requires a dedicated IP address.

• SNI technology and incompatibility with some old browsers

With a recent cPanel update, we started to support SNI technology that allows to install multiple SSL certificates on a Shared IP address. However having a few SSL certificates on a shared IP address may cause issues with older versions of some browsers. In this case, all the visitors of such websites will receive a message containing information about untrusted connection, indeed the website is going to be available via HTTPS protocol. Dedicated IP address helps to avoid such issues.