I see many dedicated servers have around 8-15 IPs. Why would I need these IPs? How would I set them up and what services would I need these for?

Alot of people use them for nameservers, dedicated IP accounts, and special services. There are plenty of uses for them. Depending on the hosting service there are ways to set them up in the CPs else you can do it by hand which isn't very fun.

One of the main uses of IP addresses is for SSL. If you (or your clients) have secure sites (i.e. https://), then you will need a dedicated IP address for each one.

Another use of the IP addresses is for the purposes of nameservers. Clients might want private nameservers, and in order to do that you would need to allocate them 2 or more IP addresses for them to register their nameservers with.

Generally the IP addresses will already be set up for you on a dedicated server. The only time you would need to set them up yourself would be with an unmanaged provider and you have ordered extra IP addresses from them.

Hope this helps you.

Damn, Andrew you beat me!

much more to-the-point than my post I must say :D

Let's say I buy a dedicated server from ev1servers.net or a related company, I would use 1 IP for my shared clients, 2 for my name servers and would I use one for a mail server?


Thanks for the fantastic help guys, I love these forums. :D


Don Wilson

Originally posted by perfectphp
Let's say I buy a dedicated server from ev1servers.net or a related company, I would use 1 IP for my shared clients, 2 for my name servers and would I use one for a mail server?

It is possible to share the main IP address for shared clients with one of the nameserver IP addresses. It all depends on how many IP addresses you can spare.

You won't want to use a separate IP address for the mail server as it should be bound to all IP addresses as it will receive mail for all domains.

So I could probably split up the IPs to.. let's say 3 types of accounts (small, medium and large account sizes) and assign one IP to each account type?

It depends whether or not you are planning on using a control panel. If you are going to be using CPanel or Plesk etc., then you won't be able to do that - you will be limited to just the one shared IP address for all non-dedicated accounts.

This is not a problem, of course, and in my opinion assigning 3 shared IP addresses as you said would be a waste of IP's. One shared IP address is enough.

However, if you won't be using a control panel and you are inclined to assign three shared IP's then yes it would be possible, as you can specify the IP addresses how you want in the Apache config file.

I was just thinking it would result in better performance, but I guess not. :P

Thanks for all of the help.

Don Wilson

Haha, a little irrelevant, but a lot of people like to have many IP addresses for vhosts on IRC as well as for websites that have their own IP.

Most hosts use 3 seperate IPs for each account.

1 Main IP

2 Nameserver IPs

There are different ways to do it but this is the most common application for webhosting

Also, for game hosting many clients are very picky about having their server on the default port, and if you are hosting mainly one game, that can eat up IPs quickly

-Greg