Hi Everyone,

I'm a complete newbie to dedicated hosting, but willing to do alot of learning, and bring the server along slowly as my administration capabilities are developed. I tried searching the board, but couldn't find the answers to my questions.

I noticed at rackshack.net that additional IP addresses are allocated by emailing them "with an explanation of why they are needed."

I'm planning to host 6 or 7 sites on a RaQ 4i to start with. I always thought that I needed a separate IP address for each domain. I now know that I don't need separate IP addresses if I use name based hosting, but it still seems like a good idea in case one of the administrators of sites I will be hosting did something silly like get an IP banned from search engines. I wouldn't want that to affect all of my sites also.

Why would I want or not want an IP address for each domain?

For what reasons would I be denied or granted additional IP addresses?


Thank you for any insights.

I am on a server at rackshack.. Here is their policy on ips>

They will give you up to 8 additional ips for free if they are all justified.
Some Justified Reasons i used
Used for nameservers
for a single domain with lot of traffic
for a domain with many subdomains

Usually you don't need a separate IP address for each site. It's better to put your virtual sites on a shared IP to conserve IP addresses. There's only a handful of reasons why a site would need their own unique IP address; probably the most common is that you can only have one SSL secure certificate per IP number. Another is if you're running your own DNS servers; you need one IP for ns1 and another for ns2 (although you can put add virtual sites with the same IP as either name server).

Another good reason is because you have diffrent package plans and you wanted to keep the IP address seperate for each plan. Thats what I told them.

I'm much more comfortable with the idea of shared ip addresses now. After thinking about it, I've probably been on many shared ip addresses that I previously thought were unique. Thanks for your thoughts.

It helps conserve IP address for what is needed. Most sites never us programs that need an dedicated IP address.