The majority of my sites are virtually hosted on one IP and I've never had any problems. The only potential problem in my experience is if you end up sharing an IP with a major spammer who gets that IP banned... it's unlikely though.
You may wish to reload your site with just the IP address a few times and see what sites come up on it. I would be carefull not to be on an IP with spammers, adult, near adult, or anything questionable.
I know this all throws a wrench in the system, but having seen several people banned because their ip neighbor was banned woke me up in a hurry.
If that isn't scarey enough, there are also search engines that still ban entire Cblocks 123.123.123.*
Sorry for re-opening this thread.
Having read through most of the posting on virtual hosting vs own IP, I actually got a list from my webhost with the other site names on the same IP address as mine.
A few of the names on the list are adult in nature (and my site is not), though they seem to be under construction at the moment. I have been assured they will stay within the guidelines of the host (no illegal stuff, no spamming, etc...), but I am still (very) worried about this.
How much should I worry?
I have just started submitting my sites to SEs and directories, so I don't really want to change IP addresses at this stage (I assume?).
BTW: I wish I had read through all of this before I chose my host. I would have gone for my own IP first time around.
Note the word 'usually'.
As a virtual host (knock on wood) we have never had an issue with IP banning. But then, I can be pretty evil when it comes to sites on our servers spamming email or search engines. Hey, we are affected too ;) and our TOS is very clear on this.
There are rare instances where this is a problem however. Personally, I would not want to be on an IP that has an adult site on it. Even if they 'cross their heart hope to die' swear they won't be spamming.. the chances just are just to serious to consider.
To make matters worse, there is evidence that Google spiders by IP. Thus the wrong site info on the wrong domain bugs that seem to be happening, and delaying updating due to IP changes has been seen as well.
If you do change IP, would leave the old up for atleast a month and then send Googlebot a note letting him/her/it know ;)
Many thanks for your advice.
Some additional news I found out is that my host is actually running their sites of the same IP address as mine. They are coming up pretty high in the SEs and it's of course in their interest to keep the IP address clean.
Taking this into account, and the fact that it would cost me an additional 100 GB pounds/year to get my own IP address, I'm probably better off putting this money towards some marketing activities, and actually get some visitors through the door first.
I'll probably review my decision in about six months.
Taking your recommendation when I move to a new IP address, I would leave both sites up in parallel for a month and re-submit my site to the SEs. Any chance that this (i.e. having two identical sites up on different IP addresses) may see this as spam by SEs?
