Using a virtual hosting company where hundreds of domains are stacked on the same IP used to be considered bad practice for SEO, especially where another site on the same IP may be blacklisted. General thinking now seems to be that the search engines pay less attention to the hosting IP, but is it still considered good practice to host a site with a unique IP address? JB
I have studied that quite a bit, and everything points out that is still does matter at least if we are only considering Google. The thing to keep in ind is the weight of this whilst not minimal it is very small. If you market your website properly, you probably wont really feel much of a difference. Take into account however that although this is not a major problem, if you wish to market a website that is aimed at a certain geographical area properly, get your site hosted in a server of that area/country.
it should be OK - there was an article on slashdot where a google engineer said there should be no problem with virtual hosting (thousands of domains on one IP).... but I guess it's not that good if one site get blacklisted (IP)...and you are on the same IP ..also, if you do have multiple sites on one IP and link each with other - not much benefit
I have a reseller account. All my clients host through me on the same IP. They are the ONLY sites that link to mine, and my site quickly became a PR4. Can't argue with that...
just found it.... Google and IP address. by Anonymous Coward Why in this day and age does google continue to penalize sites that are virtual hosted? With ip addresses becoming harder to get/justify every day why does google discount the relevance of links that don't come from a unique ip address. Please don't just deny it, I think the Internet community deserves an explanation. Craig (Google Director of Technology Craig Silverstein): I can't just deny it? What are my other choices? [] Actually, Google handles virtually hosted domains and their links just the same as domains on unique IP addresses. If your ISP does virtual hosting correctly, you'll never see a difference between the two cases. We do see a small percentage of ISPs every month that misconfigure their virtual hosting, which might account for this persistent misperception--thanks for giving me the chance to dispel a myth!
Thank you for the information. I'm interested to know if there is a way to test out our ISPs for this "misconfiguration".
On some shared hosting plans, you can get your own ip address. That is what I have with my shared hosting account. That means the only sites on that ip address are my sites. It doesn't look like this will help you much in Google, but it might help if your hosting provider hosts certain sites that might be blocked by content filters and things like that.
PR doesn't mean anything when it comes to this, honestly... anyway, in 99% of cases it will not hurt you. there are always situations where it could potentially though. there are more practical problems than SEO problems. if someone spams on that IP, all of the sudden you won't be able to email your users. not a fun situation to be in.
The network port, disk space and processor are all shared hosting. The only difference is that they take one of the several ip addresses assigned to the machine and reserve it exclusively for your use. So it is still shared hosting--all of the resources are shared. They just give you a specific ip address to point your DNS servers at and no one else uses that ip address. It doesn't cost very much because you are still using shared server. You have to do something like this is you want to have anonymous ftp upload because ftp doesn't support virtual servers like apache does. I think this is fairly common on shared hosting. For example, on the Lunarpages site they say they have "dedicated ip addresses" available. This would give you your own ip address (it is still shared hosting though). http://www.lunarpages.com/business-hosting/ On Hostforweb (which is what I use) has a similar checkbox during the ordering process. I think most other providers offer the same thing.