Hello,

I've been browsing this forum looking for a new host and started looking into Ventures Online which seems to be the only one nobody has bitched about. :)

I noticed that the plans that interest me (50Mb or 100Mb) do not have a dedicated IP. What does that mean exactly? What are the pros and cons? Any catch to that or is it just for some power users using some specific tools? I pretty much just use Dreamweaver and sometimes command line FTP to update my site.

Any help is appreciated! :)

thanks,
Michel

You do not need a dedicated IP. I'm sure they are using host headers which work the same way when people are accesing your site. The one thing you will not be able to do is access your site through an IP address.

Ok that's what I thought. I can live without that... Never had to access the site through the IP....

thanks :)

If you don't get a dedicated IP, you simply access the site in a way like this: 10.20.30.40/~username/site/ where 10.20.30.40 is the IP you will share. There is no need for a dedicated IP, but many people like to have them.

Regards
Matt

Another thing to consider is that if you are using lots of scripts or SSI files, these generally tend to use absolute paths. This means that you cannot test/debug the site BEFORE it goes online. This may or may not be important, depending on the complexity of your site, but needs to be considered.

The main thing you will need a dedicated ip for is SSL and Anon FTP

Thanks for the help guys. It seems it's something I can live without. I was looking at WizardsHosting and Ventures Online. WizardsHosting is not accepting new customers, so I went with Ventures Online.

Damn... I can login to the control panel, but not to ftp. So I tried the Help Desk, can't login there either.

This has been a very bad week. :(

DUH! I had to create a help desk account first. Note to self: Tell cat not to wake me up at 5:30am on weekends.

Note to Cat:

Don't wake MetalCrypt up at 5:30 am on the week-end.

:laugh:

Anyway, the problem was fixed pretty quickly by tech support there, it was just a minor thing preventing me to login through ftp.

Site is up, now just waiting for the DNS updates to take effect.