Sometimes SEO consultants recommend their clients to get a dedicated IP for better SEO. However, it is not completely true that having a dedicated IP improves your position in search results
Let’s take a closer look at this question.
Performance and Speed
The speed of your website impacts your search result essentially. So, you always need to strive for making your website as fast as possible.
If your account is located on a shared hosting server, your website most likely shares the same IP with another website handling high traffic. Especially if the site has a lot of visitors and heavy content, which can a bit slow down your website. And the speed impacts SEO as it influences search engine ranking position with Google. However, it doesn’t mean that getting a dedicated IP will speed up your website.
Luckily, there are numerous optimization methods to speed up website loading time significantly. If you have a WordPress website, you can refer to this guide about optimizing and speeding up the website. You can check your website with online tools such as Google Page Speed to track the website speed results after each step and optimize recommended items.
You may also consider our Business SSD plans with the pure SSD disks, which are faster and more reliable. SSD provides improved performance for consumers (particularly for larger, heavy websites such as popular Magento stores or very busy WordPress blogs).
A server with SSD disks read data faster than a standard HDD or a hybrid system that includes several servers which all share one external SSD powered storage. SSD disks are more resistant to drops, bumps, g-forces and run quietly, have lower access times, and less latency comparing to HDD.
Improved performance is achieved by higher read/write speeds on SSD disks, which allow websites to load faster. With a SSD a server can handle more read/write requests in general before becoming unstable, which confirms the stability of the server and uptime. Even during peak activity the backed up I/O requests can be served.
Security
On the shared server, your website can share an IP address with another website that has been marked as malware. In such cases some network security programs can “null route” requests to these IPs and it will make your website unreachable. Also some anti-virus software may mark all websites with the same IP as malware, which will cause false alerts against your website and such kind of alerts can be displayed in most of modern browsers (for example, 'This site may harm your computer' or 'The website ahead contains malware'). So having a dedicated IP can be a good way out. If you would like to order a dedicated IP, check the guidance How to order a dedicated IP?
SSL
SSL Certificates encrypt traffic to your site. Usually it's required by e-commerce website and websites, which store personal information.
With the cPanel version 11.38 and higher, we started to support SNI technology that allows to install multiple SSL certificates on a Shared IP address. So, a dedicated IP is not a must for installing SSL Certificate. However, having a few SSL certificates on a shared IP address may cause issues with older versions of some rare and/or old browsers. In this case, all the visitors of such websites will receive a message containing information about untrusted connection, indeed the website is going to be available via HTTPS protocol. Dedicated IP address helps to avoid such issues. Here is a list of browsers supporting SNI:
Desktop Browsers:
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