Dedicated IP

[Agum]

I'm really ashamed to ask... after all these years of webmastering experience I still don't completely understand what bad does not having dedicated IP do.

As far as my understanding goes some really old browsers can't access your site if you don't have a dedicated IP. are there actually any other disadvantages to that? I'm looking at civichost.com to host a small site of mine and I see that the cheapest 2 packages are basically the same except for dedicated IP, but it's the difference of $1 per month (well ok, some webspace difference too). Ive never really gotten to know fully what exactly do I get short of, without a dedicated IP. can anyone answer?

Edit: Oh yeah and I know too that you can't access your site via an IP address, only the domain. What about other than that?

[Agum]

Actually I'm looking at valuablehost.com now too, they seem to have good comments, and their price and features better fit my needs, but still they don't offer dedicated IP for most of their packages, so I'd still like to know what bad can non-dedicated IP do...

[Coight]

Hello,

The main reason for an IP address could be two things. You can access your site by typing http://xxx.xxx.xx.xx and not needing to wait for your domain to transfer. Another reason could be because you may want to offer redirection.

These are the only reasons I can see why you would need a dedicated ip.

Robert

[Erich]

1) Another reason would be that search engines may "ban" a certain IP because of too many/spammy submissions. On the other hand, search engines looking for IP's will certainly realize same c-class relationship as well, so that's not a real reason anymore. Altavista has been known to ban whole c-class blocks.
So actually you would need single IP's out of different blocks which no host is going to provide (don't know whether it is technically possible on the same box anyway)

2) A friend installed a script on one of my former servers which turned every request for any subdomain.domain.com into the corresponding domain.com/subdomain folder without the subdomain beeing setted up beforehand. He said this works only if every domain had his IP

3) Does https require an IP? I think yes

[Agum]

thanks for the info guys. :)

guess I'll just go with valuablehost since dedicated IP doesn't seem to be a concern. :)

[Coight]

Hello,

Forgot the most important use. For secure servers.

Robert