No unique IP address for our sites?

[Carlos]

Other hosts I have used have assigned a unique IP address for each domain. At Bluehost, it seems that all domains are automatically assigned the Bluehost IP, ie. 70.98.111.59.
Consequently you can't go to a site with just the IP address. Also, how do we set up an alternative domain (a subdomain, specifically) to have a DNS A record that corresponds to the Bluehost site?

Cheers,
C

[admin]

This is a shared hosting plan. That means you get put on a server with about 600 other people that all share the same IP address. This isn't a bad thing (Contrary to what MANY believe). If you want you can purchase a dedicated IP for $39 a year. No shared host I know would give you a dedicated IP for every customer? We would go through 300 IPs a day. That is extremely poor usage of limited IPs out there.

On our 0catch.com network we have over 1.1 million users on a SINGLE ip address. Does this hurt their search engine rankings? Not at all. We have MANY MANY sites on the network that have top 3 listings on great keywords. We use the network for backlinks and they work EVERY TIME. Not many people I know have access to the search data on 1.1 million sites and can say definitively one way or the other how search engines evaluate that data.

Regardless of the data, many will say they disagree with our IP stance, and the search engine reality. That is fine, and they are welcome to purchase a dedicated IP. That is why we have them. It doesn't matter to us WHY the customer wants a dedicatecd IP, only that they do want one. Aside from having an SSL cert, I can't really think of a good reason to have a dedicated IP, but its just my opinion.

Thanks,
Matt Heaton / Bluehost.com

[crypticfortune]

Aside from having an SSL cert, I can't really think of a good reason to have a dedicated IP, but its just my opinion.

If you want to do anything that involves outgoing connections on ports other than 80 (say polling a remote bittorrent tracker or other statistics), or incoming non-standard pots (hosting your own tracker, irc server, svn repository, etc), I believe bluehost still requires that you buy a dedicated IP (they switched to this policy last year apparently due to sluggish firewall performance). If you're making cookie-cutter websites in Dreamweaver or something like that, then, true, you probably wouldnt need it.

[Carlos]

Ok, thanks Matt. Wasn't hassling, just wondering.

Cheers,
C

[Arubalisa]

I can personally testify that this issue has absolutely no affect on your search ranking with Google.

Since switching to BH about 2 months ago the number one keyword for our site has gone from #14 to #11 (#10 on the Google databases which have gone through that new algorithim dance) for search "of about 147,000,000 English pages..."

[IUDICIUM]

To answer the real question: "How does one enter an IP address to reach a site?" In general, you don't (not unless you have a static IP, as Matt mentioned.)

Each browser today supports HTTP/1.1 protocol handshakes in which the HOST command tells the remote server what "host/domain pair" to expect the results from so that the remote client (web browser) can surf the appropriate site.

Some draw backs about "shared" hosting -

* SSL Server Certs always fail (you would need a dedicated IP for each domain you want to host an SSL Cert on.

* Around about 1000+ domains hosted on individual servers can cause server/network related lag if those hosted domains are popular. (The server I host insecurity.org on has, in general, been fairly fast -- but I'm not all that popular.)

* Sharing server resources prevents the ability to have special services enabled - like torrenting, Peer-to-Peer networking, etc. I'm not sure, but unless BH has special iptables powers I'm not aware of I don't see how you can open one port for any single individual client.

All in all, for $7 a month, what can one expect? =)

[rromanczuk]

I've read on outside forums that some people were told in order to have processes run longer then 5 minutes, they needed to buy a static IP.

Case in point, with the 50 mails/hour limitation, and dada as the recommended script to help throttle the number of emails sent some people were seeing the process end before sending to all the receipients. They were ultimately told they needed the static IP to allow the process to run long enough to finish.

I bring this up to ask the rhetoric question, how many 'hidden' reasons are there to buying a static IP?

(I don't mean this dispargingly, a host's gotta do what a host's gotta do, just food for thought.)