Standalone IP real life stories and benefits?

When shared hosting is the problem

[explorador]

Hi webmasters, using a standalone ip for your sites has been mentioned before. Shared hosting has its issues (overloads, banned or penalized ips, emails won't going anywhere because of penalized or banned mail server...). Even Brett (the founder of this community) recommends going live with your own IP.

Any real life stories? benefits?

I'm still on shared hosting but migrated from one server to another, and from company to another until I found one that works pretty fine in my case.

I can tell you ONE time I moved my sites to other company and really got to see an automatic increase of traffic. There are a LOT of factors involved so I wouldn't be sure if it was about the ip, load capacity, bandwidth or what... the site never reported any error but the change was for good on an instant.

Any real life stories?

[LifeinAsia]

I would never host a mission critical site on shared hosting. You leave yourself completely vulnerable to the things you mentioned, plus:
* generally poorer support (in my experience)
* viruses/Trojans/worms/hacking because of poor security by just one of the other sites being hosted on the same server

Note- all the issues covered can still be issues with a standalone IP if you're still on shared hosting. (Having a different IP on shared hosting is completely different from having a dedicated server.)

As far as real-life stories, when we first started our business, we were still using shared hosting. Too many problems with downtime caused by slow server and misconfigurations by "support."

Now, our downtimes are all pretty much caused by me! ;)

[maximillianos]

We simply needed more horse power as our site grew. So we made the jump to our own box. The downside is we were now more responsible for managing the box. The upside, we could do whatever we wanted on the box. ;-)

[explorador]

:) very interesting. Complicated being in charge of your own box.

[jdMorgan]

Don't confuse having a unique IP address with having a dedicated server. IP-based shared virtual hosting is available, and generally costs about U.S. $1.00 more per month than name-based shared virtual hosting.

So if the question is specifically about having your own IP address, that's separate and different to having your own stand-alone server.

Two of the advantages of having your own unique IP address are that the server is accessible via IP address before the domain name is pointed to it (and in case of DNS problems) and that you can host any number of subdomains and domains on it, since you control the DNS and can point (sub)domains to your server's IP address at will -- You don't have to 'declare' them in any restrictive control panel "add-on domain" function.

There may be search-ranking advantages to having a unique IP address, but those would be unpredictable because they are dependent upon how the search engines treat sites with and without unique IP addresses. In other words, only the search engines' engineers know for sure. But the advantages listed above are independent of search engines.

Jim

[explorador]

Very true, is not the same having unique IP than your won box.

Thanks all for sharing