What is Dedicated IP? Benefits of Having a Dedicated IP Address

You may have come across the term dedicated IP while searching for web hosting packages. In this article, we will learn all about dedicated IP and its importance in web hosting.

First, let us recall what an IP address is. IP stands for Internet Protocol. IP address is a unique numerical address assigned to each machine (or) computer connected in a particular network. IP address plays a vital role in identifying the location of a computer (or) a machine (or) a website on the network. Likewise an IP address on a network, web servers also get assigned by a unique IP address on the internet. e.g. Shared IP and Dedicated IP

What is a Dedicated IP Address?

Dedicated IP address is a unique IP address only assigned to a single hosting account user. Even though your website domain name is mapped to your dedicated IP address, you can directly access your website by typing your dedicated IP in browser address bar.

On the other hand, shared IP is used by a number of websites on a shared server. Since all the websites in a shared server are mapped to the same IP address (Shared IP), the server has to process the request to identify the particular website on the shared server, each time a website is visited and this process may take some milliseconds. Dedicated IPs do not have this time delay as they are unique and assigned to your website only.

You can think of shared IP as a postal code (or) zip code. Postal codes are used to locate a place or destination by postman and so many people in a particular place can have a same postal code. They share their postal code to indicate their location. Likewise, So many websites on a shared hosting server were assigned by a single shared IP address on the internet.

To understand dedicated IPs, you can compare it with latitude longitude coordinates system (or) GPS coordinates. Every bit of places on the earth has its unique GPS / lat long coordinates. Likewise, dedicated IP is exclusively assigned to your website only. It is not shared with others.

Also, you can compare dedicated IPs with mobile numbers. Each person has unique mobile number all over the world. It is not possible for more than one person to have a same mobile number.

Benefits of Dedicated IP

The following are the facts why you should consider having a dedicated IP for web hosting

It allows you to access your website whenever your DNS is under propagation or changing your domain name.
You can access your website even without DNS configuration with your domain name.
When using a dedicated IP, you are on the edge of SEO. Search engines like Google give preference to the websites assigned to a dedicated IP, thereby attaining page rank and other SEO benefits
Dedicated IPs speed up page load. DNS requests are processed much more faster than the shared IPs since the mapped IP address is assigned only to your website only.
If your hosting does not support SNI technology (Server Name Indication), a dedicated IP is mandatory to install SSL certificates.
Even if your hosting server supports SNI technology, some old version browsers do not support the SSL installed via SNI. In this case, it is recommended to have a separate dedicated IPs for each SSL installations but, not mandatory.
Dedicated IP prevents you from being blacklisted by spam filters. If you use a shared IP and any other user having the same IP being blocked for spam reports, you also get blacklisted for spam, as you also assigned to the same shared IP address. A dedicated IP can protect you from such email spam blacklists.
To access your web server via an FTP software anonymously, a dedicated IP is required.
Using a dedicated IP reduces the risk of server down time.

Conclusion

Finally, if you have decided to buy a dedicated IP with your hosting provider, it is good to have one. You cannot have hosting server and dedicated IP with different hosting companies. You should buy dedicatedIP where you have your web hosting account. Already, there may be an option (Button) to enable dedicated IP in your order control panel associated with your hosting package.