Dedicated IP Address vs Shared IP Address (Busting the Myths)

Dedicated IP Address vs Shared IP Address. Are you feeling lost through all these terms? Until landing on this article, I bet that you’ve dug a little on the internet resources and found some contradictories “theories” regarding the IP address topic that made you even more confused.

There is a lot of information on the internet in regards to dedicated IP addresses and how they work. If you are wondering whether or not you need or should use a dedicated or shared IP address for your hosting service, we’ve found that in 99% of scenarios, you don’t need a dedicated IP address.

Bear with us and keep reading. This article will reveal five myths [debunked] and things you should know about dedicated and shared IP addresses — the real benefits, risks, advantages, disadvantages.

What is an IP Address?

We’ll start with the basics. IP stands for internet protocol and is an address that is assigned to a domain name on the web (An example of an IP address is: 104.26.14.223).

Every server in the world that has access to the Internet has at least one IP address — to a computer, this is like a phone number.

When you sign up for a hosting service, we assign your account a specific IP address on one of our servers. If someone visits a domain name associated with your account, the visitor’s computer will find out the correct IP address to which it should connect and from which server should load the content of your website.

Currently, there are two types of IP addresses being used on the internet:  IPv4 and IPv6.

An example of IPv4 address: 104.26.14.225
An example of IPv6 address: 2606:4700:20::681a:fe1

With IPv4 IP addresses dwindling, that’s the main reason why IPv6 was introduced.

What is a Dedicated IP address?

If you have a dedicated IP address, this means that you have, in fact, a unique internet address assigned to one of your domain names. Being exactly how it sounds, a dedicated IP address won’t be shared with any other domain name – so,  your website has its own address and can be accessed either through the IP address or its domain name.

What is a Shared IP address?

When a single IP address hosts multiple sites within one web server, this means that it’s a shared one. When it comes to “share” something like the IP address, people are more skeptics and tend to develop theories on this topic.

That’s why there are a lot of myths – out there, on the internet – about how risky and harmful that kind of address can be. Read further to find out if those myths are true or false.

Dedicated IP vs Shared: Security

#1 Myth debunked: “Shared IPs are risky mostly because they allow intrusive traffic or access from one domain to another”

This is, definitely, just a myth. The only case when something like this can happen is when your web host isn’t virtualizing tenants to their own file systems.

With us, this is no longer a concern with our CageFS isolation feature. CageFS is a virtualized, per-user file system that uniquely encapsulates each account on our servers, preventing them from seeing each other and viewing sensitive information.

Dedicated IP vs Shared: SEO

#2 Myth debunked: “Websites with shared IPs have lower SEO performance.”

Lots of people believe that a shared IP address is useless from the SEO perspective. This myth is driven even further: only dedicated IPs can help a website to be recognized and ranked well by the search engines. 

A few years ago, Craig Silverstein (Director of Technology at Google) stated in an open discussion regarding the importance of dedicated IPs over SEO that some webmaster had at that time:

“Google handles virtually hosted domains and their links just the same as domains on unique IP address. If your ISP does a virtual hosting correctly, you’ll never see a difference between the two cases”.

Moreover, this was reinforced a few years back when Matt Cutts, (Former head of the webspam team at Google) stated the following at his personal blog:

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

Also, you can take a look at Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, and you’ll notice that shared or dedicated IP addresses aren’t to be found on that list.

Based on all of this information directly from Google, the truth is that a dedicated IP address won’t improve your SEO rankings. And that’s because the search engines are smart enough to “read” your site performance, whether that you’re using a dedicated IP address or a shared one.

Our advice: keep up the excellent job on your site, create evergreen and exciting content, and everything will be great.

Dedicated IP vs Shared: SSL Certificate

#3 Myth debunked: “If you want to be able to install and use an SSL certificate, you MUST HAVE a dedicated IP address.”

That’s just another misconception. In fact, by using SNI technology (Server Name Indication) servers, select the correct SSL certificate for the domain name being requested, so it’s no need for a costly dedicated IP address.

We utilize SNI technology here at ChemiCloud, and this allows you to install your own SSL certificates or free SSL certificates with our Let’s Encrypt integration. Regardless of the fact that we’re using shared IP addresses.

All our hosting plans include Free Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificates for all your domains allowing you to use https protocol for added security and SEO benefits.

Dedicated IP vs Shared: Email reputation

#4 Myth debunked: “My email reputation is influenced by the type of IP address I’m using”

The main reason you would want to use a dedicated IP in regards to sending an email is that IPs have a reputation. This is especially important when it comes to ISPs and delivery rates as an IPs reputation can impact your delivery rate and the email may not reach out to your recipient’s inbox.

As you may already notice, email blacklisting is more a consequence of wrong individuals’ habits and practices. Shared or dedicated. – there is no guarantee that our email won’t be blacklisted at some point. If you are sending a large volume of emails, to reduce the risk for your email to be blacklisted is recommended to use a third-party SMTP relay provider.

At ChemiCloud we’ve partnered with MailChannels to have your emails always delivered to the Inbox of your recipients. MailChannels Outbound Filtering is a cloud-based SMTP relay service that identifies and blocks spammers to ensure reliable email delivery.

With MailChannels Outbound Filtering enabled, you can eliminate email delivery problems caused by IP address blacklisting and improve your security. MailChannels is included for free with all our web hosting plans. Never worry about email blacklisting again!

Dedicated IP vs Shared: Website speed

#5 Myth debunked: “Dedicated IP address will speed up my website”

Your website’s speed doesn’t depend on the type of IP address that you’re using. Instead, it depends on your website’s content and, also, on your website hosting provider.  

Did you know that at ChemiCloud we guarantee lightning-fast website speed?
Nobody likes a slow website. Enjoy faster load times for your websites due to low-density servers, premium hardware, and multiple server locations for the best possible latency.

From SSD storage to server-level caching, we use cutting edge technology like LiteSpeed, HTTP/2, PHP 7, and a free CDN to make your site faster than ever. This improves your Google rankings and gives visitors the best experience possible.

Some takeaways (before you leave this topic)

• Dedicated IP addresses are no longer so powerful. Web technologies have evolved, and today they are able to supplant the benefits for a dedicated IP address;
• Search engines are smart enough to “read” your site performance, whether that you’re using a dedicated IP address or a shared one;
• Shared or dedicated IP address, you can properly handle an SSL certificate, as long as you rely on a professional hosting provider which is using SNI technology;
• Your email deliverability may be at a risk you’re using a shared IP address.
• Your website’s speed depends mainly on your web site’s code and hosting service that you’ve chosen.