Do I need a dedicated IP address?

You are researching hosting options and you have come across the option to add a dedicated IP address. Do you need a dedicated IP address if you are purchasing a shared hosting account? Yes, you do, and let me explain why…

Unless you are spending big bucks on hosting, you are most likely sharing a server with many other websites. Yes, to you it appears as though you are the only website on the machine, but you are probably one of dozens and possibly even hundreds of others. When you choose to not have a dedicated IP address, you share the IP address with many of those other sites. If one of those other sites is implementing tactics that could get you banned from the search engines then your site could suffer as a result. Getting banned from the search engines is just one of the possible outcomes. In my opinion, it is just not worth the risk.

A while back I purchased an economy hosting account from GoDaddy. All I needed was some space to host a blog. It was a small blog and I didn't need much space so I picked a $3.50/month account without a dedicated IP address. Well, all was fine for a while and then I noticed that when I posted to my blog the updates were not showing up in Google. After a little research I discovered that Google was blocking all posts from my site because of abuse. I hadn't done anything wrong but somebody else that I was sharing the IP address with decided to use an automated script to spam the search engines. Everybody sharing that IP address was blocked from Google including my site.

So, the simple solution was to just call GoDaddy and add a dedicated IP address to the account. Well, it turned out that adding a dedicated IP address added $3/month to the $3.50/month deal I thought I was getting. Now my cheap hosting account wasn't so cheap anymore.

Now I do all of my hosting with Superb.net. As of today, they have a $2.50/month account that includes a dedicated IP address. I'm sure that there are many other hosting companies out there that offer similar programs and I encourage you to do your homework before making a purchase. You can research hosting companies at http://www.findmyhost.com. Just make sure the price you are paying includes a dedicated IP address.