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One of the most crucial things to decide is whether Dedicated IP address or Shared IP address is more beneficial for improving the ranking of your website on the SERP. There can be different opinions. Therefore I am writing this blog for helping you decide which IP address will provide more SEO advantages.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization which plays very important role in improving the rank of your website because once your website is ranked higher than, there will a lot of opportunities for the users to see your website, as well as visit your website, check out the products and services offered by you and may purchase them!
Thus for easing the process of getting a higher ranking, host of SEO expertise continuously experiment with all the features of a website for finding out which are the reasons that are beneficial for a website as well as for ranking the website higher. They also try to find out the reasons which should be avoided by weakening the ranking of a website. So in this trial and testing one area is also considered which is whether Shared IP addresses or Dedicated IP addresses benefits more in improving the ranking of a website.
First, we will see what exactly is an IP address?
An IP address is 4 number strings that starts from 0 and ends up at 255, it can look like: for example 1.255.255.255. Each and every device on the network has a distinct IP address. The device could be a computer system, or a laptop, or a smartphone device or web hosting server, etc. Using these strings of numbers each device on the internet is identified. Thus IP addresses make it easy for the devices connected to the internet to send and receive the information i.e. users can easily access the internet.
There are two types of IP addresses: 1. Shared IP addresses and 2. Dedicated IP addresses.
Shared IP address:
You all know that Shared Web Hosting has only one server which is capable of hosting a large number of websites at any time and this server also has a unique IP address. Therefore all the websites which are being hosted on this server will have the same IP address as their web hosting server. Thus a single IP address is being shared by all the websites hosted on that particular server, therefore it is referred to as a Shared IP address.
Dedicated IP address:
If you own a physical server on which only one website is being hosted, then it is a Dedicated Server and the IP address assigned to it is referred to as a Dedicated IP address. In other words, you can say that a Dedicated IP address is never shared with any other device or website, it is allotted to only that particular website. The dedicated IP address can be imagined as an IP address which is assigned to one website on a server instead of the device itself.
The dedicated IP addresses are mostly used for large websites having a lot of traffic, for instance, say, e-commerce websites, which required secured encryption because these websites sometimes need to store customer data like account number or credit card number or debit card number, etc. Still, a lot of people think that rather than having thousands of websites sharing the same IP address, it is more advantageous to have a website with its own IP address, from the point of view of improving SEO of a website.
Let’s look at what is the current thinking of the people or whether dedicated IP address is really beneficial for the SEO of a website.
Dedicated IP address provides some of the best features to the users, which are beneficial for the SEO. Let’s discuss them in detail:
Page Load Time:
In shared web hosting you might have faced situations like slowing down your website because more shared resources might be used by more successful websites present on the server. Thus if your website takes more time for loading then it will further down your Google’s rankings, which is bad for your business as well as your website. It doesn’t mean that if you use a dedicated IP address for your website will increase your page load time, it means if you migrate to a dedicated server that has unique IP address may do it. Therefore instead of assigning a dedicated IP address to a website residing on a shared hosting server, it is better to move your website to a dedicated server which will host only your website and this will definitely help your website. And this migration is not possible for all the website owners, because their budget might not afford it. In that situation, they can assign a dedicated IP address to their websites being hosted on a shared server. This will help the website to load faster; it will become more reliable as well as safer.
Security:
In earlier days Google has begun providing more preference to the websites which have installed SSL certificates i.e. when an SSL certificate is installed on any website, the URL of the website changes from HTTP to HTTPS. Thus you can consider SSL as one of the factors for improving the SEO.
SSL helps in encrypting the sensitive information that is transferred through the network. SSL is more beneficial to the websites which require to store sensitive information about their users like banks, e-commerce websites, etc. SSL also helps in improving the visibility of your website online and thus makes your website work faster, due to which more users might visit your website and it will be beneficial for your website to operate faster as far as Google ranking is concerned.
DDoS Attack:
As discussed earlier, on a shared hosting server there can be thousands of websites, so there can be a possibility of some of the websites could have malware. Therefore as far as SEO ranking is concerned, such a situation is identified as a living in a bad neighborhood and there is also a possibility of being penalized by the Search engines because if your website is also residing on that same shared hosting server, then your website is also sharing the same IP address as that of the website containing malware. So a dedicated IP address may be more beneficial in these situations or you can move your website to a loyal web host or to a server which has server scanners for providing security against spam and malware.
Summary:
If you want to assign a dedicated IP address to your website then your web host can set it up for you. It is not very expensive. Thus the above discuss proves that there is a small scale impact of using a dedicated IP address as it helps in preventing your website from the danger of negative impact as far as the SEO is concerned. So to be on the safe side, investing the amount on a dedicated IP address is worth it if your business is earning revenue and your website is on the shared server then the money which it costs can be invested for dedicated IP address.
Therefore whenever you face such question the same as the one which I have raised here, there are chances of conflicts in the thinking of people. If you want to share your thoughts on this topic you are always welcome. Please leave a comment in the comment section below. Thank you for reading the blog! That’s all for today, see you soon with another interesting blog!
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