How Does IP Address Quality Affect My Website?

Search engine optimization, or SEO, helps your brand find its target audience. The search engine optimization of your site effectively does the market research and the marketing for your company. By locating the people whose interests are relevant to your company and by putting your site at or near the top of the results, your message will be delivered to the most people.

One major factor in determining the effectiveness of SEO is the reputation of the IP address on which your site resides. Your site’s page-response time is another.

Problem

Depending on your web hosting plan, multiple sites can be sharing a single IP. Now this isn’t always bad. If a dubious website on your IP practices spamming or hosts distasteful content on their site, the IP can become blacklisted and all sites associated with the IP will be undiscoverable through search engines, like Google.

Some regions censor websites by their IPs, rather than by domain names, meaning your website could be undiscoverable to an entire region simply because another website’s content was restricted in that area.

On blacklisted IPs, your emails will be delivered directly to your would-be customers’ spam folders, ensuring your email is never seen.

Solution

A dedicated IP guarantees your company isn’t disadvantaged by these negative effects. If you wouldn’t operate a physical branch of your business next door to these kinds of companies, why host your website next to them?

Along with giving your site a clean address from which to operate, dedicated IPs also make your site eligible for SSL certificate encryption. If your company collects sensitive data or takes payments online, your customers will love the security that an SSL certificate provides.

Shared hosting is a great solution for many websites, and a good hosting company will screen their clients to ensure that spamming and negative content doesn’t take place. For some websites, like busy ecommerce stores, a higher level of web hosting is needed, like VPS hosting or dedicated servers. If your site is experiencing high traffic volumes and collects information from visitors, consider spending a little more to protect your business.