I have been reading alot about SEO and some say it is important to have a dedicated IP address. What are you using? And does anyone have any insights on this SEO matter?
99.9% of all shared or dedicated hosting is always a Static IP. Even shared hosting plans will give you a static ip. I wouldn't worry about this too much unless you plan on running the site from home.
Your server has to have a dedicated IP address... This is the whole way DNS works, if it kept changing no one would ever be able to get to your site
Technically, for a website to have maximum visibility it has to have a DNS server which can translate your www.website.com to xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx IP. By which each DNS and web server hosting your site has a static IP. If you are concerned of the IP for SEO then you should not be. Web servers specially shared hosting servers give one IP to all sites hosted in the server. That is called a shared IP. I have one site operated in a shared server before but got a good SEO result. This is because search engines never actually look for your xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx IP but actually look for your domain. Just like for example, Google sitemaps never asks for your "preferred IP" but they do ask for your "Preferred Domain". As long as your DNS server is good, giving fast lookups for your www.website.com you should have no problems. If your DNS fails to respond quickly the effect is longer page loads from your site or even... your site wont be loaded as SEs and users cannot look it up your DNS.
i think he may mean dedicated hosting not shared? so one single IP for your site, not shared amongst a lot of sites. my opinion is that it doesnt offer much benefit so if you have shared then i wouldnt worry too much.
It wouldn't matter anyway. Most of the Web sites on the Internet are on shared IP addresses - the only reasons why they fail to rank well are because they never bothered to optimize their sites and content for their users (and search engines) they used "black hat" tricks which got them banned (some cases - does not apply to the majority of the Web sites in existence) they tried to optimize their sites, but failed they tried to optimize their sites, and despite being successful, got out-ranked by sites that were better than theirs and so on... Long story short, if you needed a private IP address to be successful, the SEO "industry" would never have become as large as it is today.