Google and subdomains

quick question!

[aross]

I have been reading about subdomains in the forums and am learning...

A quick technical question... my host says this:

Subdomains: if you would like this feature to use a different ip than the main domain, please have your sysadmin add an A entry subdomainip.lifetimeinfo.com with the ip you wish to use for all future subdomains.

Do I want to have a different ip for all my subdomains?

Many thanks!

[IanTurner]

Much of the decision to use different IP addresses for different subdomains will depend on what you are trying to do with the subdomains.

I would suggest that you don't split the subdomains over a wide range of IPs as would be sensible if you were running different domains.

It will show up as being unusual. Most subdomains would be on similar IP range as they would utilise a block of servers in the same location.

The reasons for using out of block IPs should be technical for instance if you have facilities that require particular specialist hosting requirements such as a COM object when the majority of the sites use Unix hosting.

Splitting the subdomains within the same block of IP addresses would be sensible for loading purposes.

For example if you have a heavily used forum it could go on a seperate server under

forums.example.com

You can also split the subdomains for load balancng purposes.

I cna see no sensible SEO reasons why the subdomains should be hosted on seperate servers, though no doubt there will be other opinions.