Hosting your site - unique IP or shared IP?

Do you use a unique IP or a shared IP for your site or sites?

I've read pros and cons for each - that a unique IP will improve your presence on the 'net, and your rankings (if that's of importance to you), while a shared IP can be just as good, but is riskier if any other sites sharing it with yours are problem sites.

What do you use, and what is your experience or opinion of the effects of each?

I've always used the shared IP, since it's cheaper of course, but early on I was convinced it would be just as good for a small site like mine. So far, my sites have decent traffic, but I'm now wondering about changing one to have it's own unique IP, maybe it will make a difference.

Casino City sites have always used unique IP addresses. In fact, we run with quite a number of subdomains to split our site up into sites for different geographic areas, each with their own ip address (e.g., nevada.casinocity.com).

Michael

I use shared hosting and have done for a number of years. I don't think that it's made any difference to rankings at all and so far no major problems.

I used to have them on unique IP's (Different C class). Godaddy can set that up for you if you call them and talk to an operator. However, since last October I've placed them on a shared server here in Costa Rica.

I have 22 of my sites on the same server and 30 other sites with dedicated I.P's . I haven't yet worked out which is the better option and find the only benefit thus far is that advertisers who buy links tend to prefer to choose the sites with dedicated I.P's.
In fact a certain crowd refused to buy any links when I had all of my sites on the same server.
Of course if you don't sell links - it probably wouldn't be a problem

My main site uses only unique IP, because I had some bad experience with shared IP. When I changed my hosting in October,2006 I had to change it twice in October, because the first hosting was so bad (I didn't know about that) and my neighbors were adult sites that was a bug surprise for me, so I moved my site from those hosting to another one and ordered a unique IP, that not to have any neghbors. Now I'm very glad with my current hosting.

aksana, after you changed your site to a unique IP, did you notice any increase or decrease in your traffic to that site?

I use both unique and shared IP, however the latter only as backup. Earlier we had the live site as shared IP. The problem we had with shared IP was that we couldn't just change or upgrade any resources that were shared as we would have liked. This had caused us considerable botheration.


Nandakishore
Online Casino Newsroom

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Originally Posted by Don

aksana, after you changed your site to a unique IP, did you notice any increase or decrease in your traffic to that site?

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I can't say that my traffic was increased only due to the unique IP changes, but I believe that the unique IP played and continue playing a good role for my site.
As for me my site is a real business and therefore I prefer to have a business plan of my hosting with the unique IP :-).
I can't say that unique IP is so important, maybe it's not important at all.
But I'm not worried about my neighbors, I'm alone on this IP :eyebrow:

Having seperate IPs, and better still on seperate Class C's, will have a positive effect on any internal linking you do between sites, but how much effect, who knows. And dedicated servers obviously protect against ending up in a bad neighbourhood.

I was cuorius about this as when I do a check on my site there are quite a few others as well who in turn are ranging from a regular buisness to those that appear to be make money fast sites.

Is this why hosting is cheap at some sites?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MichaelCorfman

Casino City sites have always used unique IP addresses. In fact, we run with quite a number of subdomains to split our site up into sites for different geographic areas, each with their own ip address (e.g., nevada.casinocity.com).

Michael

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Michael, what is the advantage of having subdomains? Wouldn't pages work as well?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Don

Michael, what is the advantage of having subdomains? Wouldn't pages work as well?

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Subdomains are really completely separate websites, and they can be hosted on different web servers. In our case, nevada.casinocity.com is a site with several hundred pages covering casinos in the state of Nevada.

We believe there are some benefits. For example, we believe the home page for this site is treated better than if it were www.casinocity.com/nevada. Of course we have enough pages in this site for it to be a significant site on its own. To the extent pages are treated as somewhat more relevant when they are closer to a home page, this strategy also makes the pages we have about Nevada one step closer to the home page. Also, when we originally did this many years ago, some search engines would limit the number of pages they would include in their index from a single site. Having tens of thousands of pages spread across a few sites increased the number of pages of ours that were indexed at that time.

Michael

Just as a follow up to this topic - I did change one of my sites over to a dedicated IP, and have seen an increase in traffic.