Hosting & SE results

[Cavemptr]

I was reading an article today about mistakes made when trying to get good search engine rankings. One of the items they mentioned was make sure your site has its own unique IP address. They said if you share an IP address with spammers, your site could end up getting banned. Well, this not being my area of expertise, I checked with my hosting company today. Their response was, "we do not offer unique IP addresses because it is a multi-tenant hosting platform." I don't know what this means, but I do know I don't have a unique IP address.

I have good rankings for my target keyword phrases, and do not want them in jeopardy. Should I change hosting companies? And if so, doesn't this present a whole other set of potential problems in screwing up my rankings?

Don

[WebSavvy]

Hi Don, and welcome to the forums. I wouldn't worry to much about that if I were you.

If an SE is going to ban a spammer it is done so by DOMAIN name and not by IP address. :)

What is meant by multi tenant platform is, they have IP based hosting whereas there may only be 8 or 10 IP addresses allocated to the server you are on. Therefore, they have the partition setup where domains can be also accessed as this manner: http://00.00.00/~user/ which means that many sites can be hosted on the same server using the same IP address. This is what's known as virtual hosting.

I have a few sites of my own that had shared IP addresses, and also had top 10 ranks on their keyword terms in quite a few engines. They were at the same server, same IP address, for more than 3 years and I NEVER had one problem with it as far as my sites being punished for what someone else was doing on the same IP address I had.

Hope this helps you to relieve your worries.

:)

[scottiecl]

Don-

I have sites with unique IP's and sites that share IP's- no difference in the rankings. All do well.

I don't think you need to worry as long as your host is fairly reputable.

[chinook]

What you are referring to is name based hosting. As the packet comes into server requesting a web page, the server reads the header and then serves up the right content. There are only a limited number of IP addresses available for the public under the current IP address scheme (some day a new scheme with a much larger number of addresses may become available), so each ISP or web hosting company has to justify their IP address use or risk losing them. One thing that justifies a dedicated IP address is if you plan to run a security certificate.

A substantial number of web hosting companies including some very large ones (eg earthlink) use name based hosting.

[Cavemptr]

Thanks for the replies! Here is the article I was referring to:

http://www.promotiondata.com//article.php?sid=228&mode=&order=0

Reason #9 in the article.

Don

[scirceo]

Originally posted by scottiecl

I have sites with unique IP's and sites that share IP's- no difference in the rankings. All do well.

I don't think you need to worry as long as your host is fairly reputable.
Just catching up on my reading here. Thanks for clarifying that, scottie and chinook. I'd read the same thing about shared hosting.

--Steve