What is the advantage of having an IP Address?

Regards, Pavel

what do u mean what is the advantage of having an ip address???

everyone on the net has an ip address

or do u mean, what is the advantage of a static ip?

Originally posted by matt2kjones
what do u mean what is the advantage of having an ip address???

everyone on the net has an ip address

or do u mean, what is the advantage of a static ip?

As in for a web site.

I am assuming that you mean a static IP?

There is not advantage really other than if you need a ssl certificate or annonymous ftp.

Otherwise shared IP's are just fine.

One other advantage to static Ip's are for search engine positioning, you dont have to have one to get listed but if you are on shared hosting with 10 other people and one of those spams a search engine, say Google for example, Google may then block the IP address of the offending site, which could compromise your listings also if your on the same shared IP

Thank you for your replays.

Actually a static IP isn't relevant for an SSL host as the certificate is not locked to IP but to the precise domain name. Moving IP, or running multiple IP's with the same certificate when load balancing is fine.

For google there is another issue which is that they cache DNS records (name to ip mappings) for much longer than specified in the SOA record. LIke weeks rather than minutes, hours or days. Changing IP can cause you to drop out of the index altogether until the index is rebuilt or they next do a nameserver query. We get spidered by GoogleBot several times a day, and have lost top position on relevant queries a few times due to necessary IP changes, although if an IP becomes unreachable that may force a new lookup as I've seen that happen too, but I'd really recommend avoiding changes if at all possible.

I think we actually mean dedicated IP address? Static IP applies to configuration of a client machine: static as opposed to DHCP.

There are more advantages to a dedicated IP address - one is that you can continue accessing your site (and sending and receiving email) when there's a problem with DNS.

Another is it's useful for obfuscation: I know that in some countries (like where I am) Big Brother is watching all the time and I feel like accessing my scripts via my IP address rather than my domain affords me a slightly higher degree of protection...

Then the main advantage as mentioned above is the search engine thing: it's said that you'll get a lower ranking if you share your IP address with other sites.

And there might be problems with emails getting blocked as well if people sharing your IP address have been up to bad things.

I always look for a dedicated IP address when evaluating plans - I'd say it's worth $1-2/month.

You really lose ranking in google etc if your IP changes? =/

Well, your site can disappear from the index, only to return at some point in the future. Ranking is determined largely by your presence on other sites and their ranking, and so it's a temporary but perhaps prolonged.issue. You don't have to start from scratch building a ranking again.

The first thing that seems to happen is that you drop out of the index very quickly if your site becomes unreachable, although I have also seen Google then equally quickly pick up that the site has moved elsewhere, in my case when I switched DNS to one of our hot standby servers and wound the SOA values right down. Then when the main server came back the DNS was switched back to the primary, however now google was spidering the standby machine, even though the primary was back, and continued to do so for several weeks. Possibly then turning off the standby for a while would cause google to fail on that host and rediscover the primary, but I didn't want to do that. So I then had a period where google was spidering the backup server, which was ok as it was kept up to date, but not ideal. I've also seen it stop spidering some domains or at least not update the index more or less daily as it does usually for us.

Basically you can end up with Googlebot not doing what you want or need it to do when certain infrastructure changes happen, and is a downside to what's otherwise a good thing of being spidered frequently. It would be great to be able to ask it to do a new lookup of the IP on demand, but AFAIK that's not possible.

I find it hard to believe a site would get dropped from a search engine or have a lower ranking when using a dynamic ip. I have several sites in Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, Lycos, etc. using a dynamic ip with excellent rankings in top keywords over the past 3 years. None of the sites have been dropped either and the rank continues to improve over time. It's relevent content and keyword optimization that matters until I hear otherwise from Google.

"Shared"; not "Dynamic". I really doubt there are any webservers or websites using using "dynamic" IP addresses - unless you read WHT too much and move around all the time!

Originally posted by Toolz
"Shared"; not "Dynamic". I really doubt there are any webservers or websites using using "dynamic" IP addresses - unless you read WHT too much and move around all the time!

Geez... thank you wise one for the enlightening education but I said dynamic and meant dynamic. I still have a few personal sites running on a cable connection from home using a dynamic dns service and have been for several years.

Cool...

I have found that Google never loses my sites if I use dedicated IP's.
What I mean is if I move them to a new server and give them a new IP, Google has no trouble finding them again. But I found that with a shared IP if I move a site to a new server Google will sometimes lose the site for a month or two.

This may just be coincidence.

Almost all dedicated IP's are not portable anyway, so moving hosts will require the issuance of a new dedicated IP, negating any "Google benefit".

Mail servers on a server run on the same IP no matter what dedicated IP your site was given , so the blacklist avoidance argument is pretty much out the window.

For SSL certificate I guess its most imp
Rest you can do almost everything on shared IP.

Originally posted by Prince
I have found that Google never loses my sites if I use dedicated IP's.
What I mean is if I move them to a new server and give them a new IP, Google has no trouble finding them again. But I found that with a shared IP if I move a site to a new server Google will sometimes lose the site for a month or two.

This may just be coincidence.


It is not a coincidence. I tired a shared IP and dropped out.
Went back to dedicated and right back.
Plus, having a shared IP can cause you problems if someone is spaming!
Since I use SSL, I now always keep my dedicated IP.
I have top listings in google,yahoo,AOL,MSN and any other engine you can name.(top 5)
My traffic goes up 10 fold with a dedicated IP.
Just my learning the hard way since 1997.
Disagree if you like, but the above post is right on!

Do u recommend a dedicated ip for each domain that u have?
Or can you fit like 3 domains on one?

Also, can you host a site across 2 providers such that if the server at hostA goes down there will be an auto switchover to hostB??

Thanks guys!

Well, I fit about 10 domains and subdomains to a single IP address and do not have any problems with it. I supposed if you want to share 1000 domains to the same IP address, you should not have any problems with it. That is provided all the sites are on that same server. Each server needs its own IP address though.

As for hosting a site across two server, it is possible but might not be very effective if you do not have all the hardware needed.

If you host your DNS on a server you can manage, you could always change the DNS entry to point to th working server and the switch over could happen anything from a minute to a couple of hours.

I am not expert so I will let the rest answer the question.

Keep in mind that old HTTP clients don't know about the host header. That means that they can only access one host per IP address (the default host). Granted, this must be a minute number of browsers and perhaps only a small percentage of other clients, but I'd bet there are still some people out there who can't get to name-based hosts (a very few, but some).

In modern HTTP, you make your request and then you have a Host header that tells the server which host you want. That's name based virtual hosting that we all know, love, and many of us (but not me) sell.

In old HTTP you just sent a GET and the server sent you back whatever it was set to serve for that IP address.

I would imagine fewer and fewer people have old browsers like this though, but I don't know any exact numbers.