Are there advantages of switching Websites to a private IP from an IP shared on a Webserver?

[Anita_Clark]

I just did a reverse IP Lookup for both my sites and noticed they were on shared WebServers with 370 and 719 domains respectively. A few domains hosted on each IP looked very suspicious too.

Is there an advantage of switching my websites to a private IP from an IP shared on a Webserver?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Anita,

Great question! Thanks for giving me the opportunity to address it.

98-99% of the time, it should make no difference whether you are on a shared hosting environment with dynamic IPs or if your on a dedicated server with a dedicated IP, or any combination of these.

There are a few, rare exceptions:

1. The shared server is very slow. This isn't a shared issue per se, but more of a general hosting concern. You shouldn't have this with most decent host, but if your server is mis-configured and your content takes a long time to load, this could impact your SEO.

2. "Search engines don't want to overburden sites when they crawl them. To minimize this, they cluster sites by IP address and, if they detect a problem on one site, they reduce the crawl rate on all sites sharing that IP." Source - http://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-seo

   Most of the time you don't need to worry about this, but if Google reduces your crawling frequency because of problem sites on your IP, this may give you cause to worry.

3. Linking to bad neighborhoods. I assume this doesn't apply to you, but when Google finds a bunch of sites on the same IP that all link to each other suspiciously, this isn't good.

I don't mean to over-state these issues. Like I said, 99% of the time it isn't a problem. More important is making sure you're with a quality hosting company. Another alternative that I'm personally a fan of is using Cloudflare. I won't go into the specifics, but his is a free, virtual CDN that both speeds up your site and offers you extra security.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your website.

[Anita_Clark]

Exactly the type of information I was seeking.  Thanks so much Cyrus!