Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Don't go with virtual hosting - go with a stand alone IP.
Can any of you explain to me what this means? Right now I pay 7 bucks a month for shared hosting, however my website is profitable, and growing. I plan to pay $20/month for virtual hosting, but this statement scares me. I am not really big enough to go for dedicated hosting yet. I only receive 500 uniques a day, but I am constantly growing making new pages, and I get on Google with no problem anymore. Protecting my site is now essential. Finding a great reliable host (not too expensive yet) is also essential. So what does this statement mean and why is it important?
So the question I want answered is:
Does going with a stand alone IP mean to purchase a Dedicated Server Space? How would this be a benefit for the search engines, and how would it protect me? Do you guys recommend me going with this "stand alone IP"?
If you are on an IP with 100 sites and 20 of them are nasty sites, is the tech going to set there and enter a manual ban on all 20 and risk missing 10 others he doesn't know about? Nah, he is going to do that which is easiest and just ban the ip.
It means se techs do what you do
I would rather let 10 possibly nasty sites through the net than ban 70 I know are OK.
I think we all know single ip and virtual hosting is what they were talking about.
Given what we have learned in the last week [webmasterworld.com]; such as good sites register for 10 years - then certainly, Good Sites are hosted on their own ip.
I have seen shared or virtual plans that offer you a dedicated IP. I think it usually costs $5 more per month.
The next step up is called a reseller plan. This allow you to add as many domains as you want under your account. A server can have multiple resellers on it and they share resources like disk space and CPU.
There are also plans called virtual dedicated servers which isolate reseller plans from each other so if one of the other sites on the server hogs resources it won't bring your sites down.
Then of course there are dedicated servers in both managed and unmanaged flavors.
That is, most of the IPs one gets are in a sequence. i.e. xx.xx.#*$!.23, .24, .25 etc.
Can what is happeneing on say xx.xx.#*$!.23 effect xx.xx.#*$!.25? For that matter, to what extent beyond what Brett mentioned can two sites on the same IP effect each other?
I guess this leads to the larger question of whether Google holds the behavioir of one site against another site with the same owner? I image Google would be able, but does it?
[.#*$ should be ex ex ex... WW config won't allow it]
Looking at general characteristics of sites in an effort to determine the characteristics of good and "bad" sites.
Will having two sites on the same IP hurt you? That alone will likely not, but that combined with other factors (i.e. registrar, whois info, dns, length of registration, date of site inception, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum) may.
It's all about creating the best looking profile.
However it's also true that many "spammers" will have a large number of domains hosted on the same IP because it's extremely cheap. I've seen packages that allow you to have 50+ domains on 1 IP at no additional charge and that's not even getting into sub-domains which can generally be added for free.
Again, I would doubt very seriously if there would be any penalty for having a site on a shared IP, but it could be used as another "signal of quality" or "low-quality" as the case may be. Enough positive or negative signals and.....
facts:
you can have a dedicated ip associated with your domain with a shared hosting - for a few more dollars.
virtual hosting (a more expensive type of shared hosting) means you are also sharing the same server with other domains. you almost always have a dedicated ip with your virtual hosting plan. typically, there are less number of clients sharing the same server compared to the regular shared hosting plans. also you get some of the benefits of a dedicated server - such as telnet, ssh, etc access to the server.
the se's ban uo to the ip level. from personal experience, i changed the ip on some of my domains and the se's started visiting/indexing them.
as has been pointed out, sharing servers leaves you open to quality problems outside your control. but it is certainly much cheaper than virutal or dedicated hosting. so depends on your roi.
whether shared or dedicated, i always use a dedicated ip for several reasons:
- having a dedicated ip, i can support multiple domains and sub-domains on my single account.
- i can easily switch the domains to a different server. in fact i use this to counteract the typically low availability of shared hosts. i monitor my domains and if they stop responding automatically failover to a different hosting account (different ip).
so, shared or dedicated hosting? - depends on your roi, a business decision.
dedicated ip? yes, for a few more dollars a month, whether shared or dedicated hosting, it is definitely worth it.
As far as risks, the problem Brett describes is real. If a search engine tech identifies multiple spam sites on an IP address, he/she might do the quick and easy thing and penalize the IP, even if some sites of unknown quality (like yours) are there.
Search engines have never been overly concerned if a step that removes spam sites creates some collateral damage. Eliminating spam sites improves search quality. If a "good" site gets eliminated, there are still plenty of other good sites that will keep most searchers satisfied.
A good example of this is the purge of Zeus-generated link directories a few years ago. Lots of garbage directories were created with that tool, and Google found it expedient to penalize all that it could find (even including directories that were created with great care and attention to quality). Even less fair, a handful of random pages that had the bad luck to be named "themeindex" (the Zeus footprint) also got penalized. Fair? No. A net improvement in search quality? Probably.
I'd recommend a unique IP for any site you plan to invest time or money in.
I was speculating about whether two distinct sites onwed by the same individual/company could effect one another, independent of cross linking schemes? I imagine shared or "close" IP addresses, domain contacts/ownership info, past assosciations, linking patterns beyond direct corss linking, etc could be used to determine the probability of ownership.
Guilt by "blood line"?
Regarding risks, is a stand alone IP only recommended because of saving yourself from bad neighbourhoods? or are there other benefits too?
What should be done in the case when all the sites sharing that IP are your own sites (like a reseller account with unique IP) and are clean sites - would the risk factor here come into play too?
shared IP class a b c etc.
virtual host vs shared host how do you tell?
I tried reading up on this but all I can find is stuff written in 'geek' it leaves me in the dust.
My main website is on a shared hosting paying 7.99 per month and i found that the servers hosts 85 other websites. I requested a stand alone i.p for my specific website but there is no such service provided.
Any help for this?
If you are hosting a 2 or more domains on the same IP, G will check whether the domains have:
1. Duplicate content, and
2. User the same directory structure
So this will be another reason you may wish to consider a separate IP. It's the "c" class that I would recommend be different (IP=aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd). There are other threads on ww that talk in-depth about the dupe-content filter. Too late to go trawling to find it for you I'm afraid.
We're about to experiment with the dupe-content filter. So ask me in 6 weeks how it went wrt partically dupe content on same IP for competitive kw.
However if you are sharing a server/cluster with 2k-20k sites all on the same ip, your pages indexing will be queued with all of theirs. (As if there were 20k bots grabbing pages from you server it may just interfere with your regular traffic somewhat)
Possibly inflated figures but you get the idea. So I'd imagine you'd get indexed slower. Probablly not by really enough to worry about though...
I'd recommend a unique IP for any site you plan to invest time or money in.
I am actually following this advice, since I want my domain to be protected. My only problem now is, I am so used to shared hosting, and it being so easy. A few days ago, I purchased Virtual Hosting with a dedicated IP address, and when I signed in my account, I was so lost. Instead of Cpanel, I was introduced to WebAdmin, a program I never used. Apparently I have full control and can install whatever I want now (NICE!), something I was not even aware of, until I purchased this virtual account. I am very good with computers, so I can probably learn how to do this, but I didn't realize that having a virtual or dedicated server, gives you too much freedom, where it can be hard to learn. Does anyone else use WebAdmin? What other control panels do you guys use? Is it possible that I can install a free version of CPanel?
It means se techs do what you do - the thing that is easiest and quickest to do.If you are on an IP with 100 sites and 20 of them are nasty sites, is the tech going to set there and enter a manual ban on all 20 and risk missing 10 others he doesn't know about? Nah, he is going to do that which is easiest and just ban the ip.
If the SE techs ban the IP of the host, the domain name actually is still safe technically. Its worse to have the domain name banned, than the IP of the host, right? This way, you can just switch to another host...or am I wrong about this?
I would like to know whether most websites on the first page of search results in google are hosted on dedicated servers? Or are they on shared/virtual?
I have been on a shared hosting account for 9 months. My rankings are wonderful, so apparently hosting does not have an affect on rankings. My main concern is, by switching to a new host with a dedicated IP, that my rankings will drop. This probably wont happen though, right?
My main concern is, by switching to a new host with a dedicated IP, that my rankings will drop. This probably wont happen though, right?
This is what concerns me too. after readig this thread, i am planning to move to virtual hosting or one with dedicated i.p. This means i am going to switch to other host or upgrade my current webhost account. But i heard that it takes a few days to change the domain name server. I suppose few days wont affect your ranking at all. Or does it?
Take a look at hosts out there using clustered server architectures - efficient use of resources, high reliability and tens of thousands of domains under a single IP.
If I were Google, I would think long and hard before penalising that.
" can someone 'in the know' write a little blurb about how to know what you've got?
shared IP class a b c etc.
virtual host vs shared host how do you tell? "
Cheers,
Suggy
" can someone 'in the know' write a little blurb about how to know what you've got?
It's pretty easy...
1) If you can access your domain by IP, then you have a dedicated IP. If you must use the actual domain name to get to your site, you are on a shared IP.
2) Class A B C. An IP is none of these. This refers to blocks of IP addresses. An IP address is made up of 4 sections such as 255.255.255.255 or AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD. When people talk about different Class C IP addresses, they mean IP addresses, whose C block are different.
Example:
123.204.105.255 is on the same C block as 123.204.105.202 but on a different C block as 123.204.255.162
3) Shared/Virtual This doesn't really matter. It's the unique IP. Some shared hosting will allow you to have a unique IP for a small extra fee per month.
I have never had any trouble what so ever with ranking .. but I'm open minded and lets say for the sake of argument that Google will give you a lower rank because of the "bad neighborhood" of websites using same IP ..
Then by the same token ..maybe Google rewards those in good neigherhoods with better ranking ;)
you are right that when you are having duplicate content, it is the best to have but what if you do not have any dupe content?
