Dedicated IP Hosting vs. Shared IP Hosting

Anatomy of Website Hosting

A practice known as “Shared IP Hosting” is something that a large amount people and companies do not pay close attention to or understand, even if they have heard of it. There are also website developers who do not disclose this information to their clients simply because sharing IP addresses saves the web developer a few dollars on annual hosting costs; as a result the developer pockets the extra money when they should be passing the savings on to the client.

What is Shared IP Hosting?
Shared IP hosting is the method of having multiple domains sharing the same IP address. For example, Teknowerkz.com is the domain of this website and the dedicated IP address is 205.134.250.97. If you enter the IP address “205.134.250.97” into an address bar, it will resolve to the Teknowerkz.com index page. On the contrary, a shared IP address will generally not resolve to a specific domain. However, I must note that there are ways to make a shared IP address resolve to a specific domain through server configuration, but that gets very technical. The bottom line is that the results are the same no matter how a shared IP address is configured.

Is Shared IP Hosting Really Dangerous?
Shared IP hosting is potentially dangerous because one does not normally know whom the IP address is shared with. For example, if an IP address is shared with one or more domains (in some cases domains are shared with tens of thousands of other domains) then the domain is entrusting that all other domains are not participating in questionable activity or worse, illegal activity. Theoretically, when an offending domain is caught all the other domains sharing the IP address will pay the penalty and not just the offending domain(s). The consequence for the honest domains will simply be temporary or permanent exclusion from the search engine index under the shared IP address, which equates in to loss of online visibility and ultimately, loss of business revenue.

Conversely, the practice of sharing IP addresses is more common than one may think. According to a Harvard Study by B. Edelman at Harvard Law School, 87.3% of hosting services utilize shared IP addressing for active COM, NET, and ORG domains. However, the possibility that a domain that is not participating in illegal activity will suffer consequences because of offending domain(s) does not seem to be a risk that one should take. Logical rational suggests that one should become more knowledgeable of website hosting services and demand to have a dedicated IP address. In addition, a business should invest the extra few dollars annually to have a dedicated IP address to protect ones online business identity and more importantly to protect against loss of revenue.

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