Wondering if having a dedicated IP hosting account can or cannot effect google/bing rankings? If so by how much?
According to Google, a dedicated IP will not help your SEO rankings, and is not a justified expense for SEO.
Having a dedicated IP hosting account may help in coming months. Recently, Google added website security as a new ranking factor and dedicated server is more secure than shared server. So, it may help but not sure how much.
A dedicated IP will be required if you plan to ever put SSL on your website. Along with that, it is good for SEO to have your sites on dedicated IP's, but only really if they're on different C-Classes.
Having a dedicated IP address will indirectly help your website for rankings by increasing the page loading speed because search engines just love websites with good loading speed
A dedicated IP may help you avoid from bad neighborhoods (using shared IPs) so indirectly it may help in by not hurting your rankings due to the side effect of a bad site that may happen in shared hosting/IP.