Virtual Hosting or Dedicated IP?

Webmasters who are to put up new websites all will face decisions to whether host with a shared IP or a dedicated IP. With a share IP address, there are multiple websites that are being hosted on the same IP address. With a dedicated IP address, you are the only user of that address.

Some webmasters have experienced dramatic ranking increase, only by switching from a shared or virtual IP to a dedicated IP. One of the reasons for the ranking increase is that search engines do take into account the faster loading speed while your site is hosted on a dedicated server. Very often with virtual hosting, your IP address is shared with over 500 other websites. Technically, if there are 20 visitors requesting web pages from other webmasters’sites on this IP who are ahead of your visitor, your visitor will have to wait in queue, resulting in slower page load times.

The second issue reported by some SEO professionals is that the search engine spiders are only able to index fewer pages on slower servers (as an IP is shared). This means there will be fewer pages of your site that are available to be shown in the SERP, which reduces your siteâ€™s overall visibility in the search engines.

Other webmasters, however, argued that they have no control of who their neighbours are with a shared IP. Your site may be sharing a server with an IP that is banned by the search engines.

However, Google’s Matt Cutts previously explained the above findings are mis-conceptions of how Google handle IP addresses.

“There is no PageRank difference whatsoever between a virtual hosting (shared IP) vs a dedicated IP.”

“It’s fine to run your website off your home DSL, as long as you configure your webserver correctly. As long as Google can load your web pages, it doesn’t really make a different whether the pages load in half a second or 5 seconds.”

Early in 2003, Craig Silverstein, Google’s Director of Technology, also tried to correct this mis-conception of many webmasters and SEO professionals.

“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.”

In November 2006, Matt Cutts re-confirmed the above statement.

“I’m happy to affirm that this statement which was true in 2003 is still true now. Links to virtually hosted domains are treated the same as links to domains on dedicated IP addresses.”

The bottom line is that hosting your site on shared IP does you no harm at all, unless you are those webmasters who deliberately try to push for Google’s spam filer, which is a totally different issue other than hosting on virtual IP.

Share and Enjoy: