author: Kathy

When choosing between the Doteasy $0 Hosting plan and the Doteasy Ultra/Unlimited Hosting plan, in addition to storage and traffic allowance or scripting capabilities, another thing you should consider is whether or not you need a dedicated IP for your website.

Dedicated IP means that a website has its own IP address. In other words, it doesn’t matter if you type in the website URL or the IP address, both will bring you to the same website.

Common questions regarding dedicated IP addresses:

1. Why do you need a dedicated IP address?

There are two main reasons why you will need a dedicated IP address:

a) You need to install a private SSL certificate on your website. For example, if you are running an e-commerce website or applications that need data encryption, your SSL certificate requires you to have a dedicated IP for your website.

b) You need access to your account by FTP and HTTP when the domain name is inaccessible (ie. domain name propagation during the transfer hosting process).

2. Would having a dedicated IP address enhance the performance of my website?

No, because a dedicated IP address does not equal a dedicated server.

A dedicated server is when your website is the only one on the server, whereas in a shared hosting environment, your website is one amongst others on a server. With that being said, in a dedicated hosting environment you do not need to share server resources (ie. disk space and bandwidth) with other websites, thus guarantying better website performance.

You do not need a dedicated server to have a dedicated IP for your website.

For example, when you host your website on the Doteasy Ultra Hosting plan, you are still on in a shared hosting environment (you’re sharing server resources with other websites), but the number of websites on your server will be lesser than that on the $0 Hosting plan, and in addition, a unique IP address will be assigned to your allotted space. This way, your website can be reached via both the domain URL and the IP address.

3. Would having a dedicated IP address give me better search engine ranking results?

There has been ongoing debate in the SEO industry regarding this and here’s my thought on it:

If you have one website, a dedicated IP will not rank you higher in search engines. But, if you have multiple websites that are interlinked, then you might want to consider putting them on different IPs.

For example, you have 3 websites and they rank fairly well on search engines. You want to get a 4th website and you plan on placing a link on each of the 3 existing websites to your 4th one to boast its ranking. Search engines will detect that your new website has links from 3 websites. When it goes to check the IPs, it will find that they are all hosted on the same server (same IPs). The search engine may assign a smaller rank value to your new website because it assumes that the sites linking to it are all related/owned by the same person. However, if you put each website on a different IP, the search engine will “think” that the sites are unrelated and thus assign higher link value to those links.

So, back to our main question: shared or dedicated?

  • Will you need a private SSL for data encryption on your website?
  • Do you need FTP and HTTP access via domain URL and IP address?
  • Is your website part of a web of interlinking sites?

If you need a dedicated IP for your website, then you will need the Doteasy Ultra Hosting or Unlimited Hosting plan. (*Note: Dedicated IP is included free of charge with the Ultra Hosting and Unlimited Hosting plans)

If there’s anything I’ve missed or if you want to share your thoughts on this, feel free to leave a comment.

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