As a hosting provider, I would tell you that’s the case because upgrading means more $.
As a decade-long web developer, I would tell you that it depends on both the IP reputation and hosting provider reputation as well as your website’s content quality.
Certain hosting companies that have a poor track record of hosting spammy sites and phishing sites will impact subsequent website scores internally, even if they do no admit it, except for the search engines hosting platform - that is of course.
If you are looking to grow big on your business, look for hosting that provides dedicated IP with good reputations (check on AbuseIPDB) and then work on new quality content using that IP to build SEO authority on that. The reason why IPs are associated is because spam and scams usually take advantage of low-cost shared hostings to increase their impact with very low cost hence efficiency. Hosting companies that limit website counts would definitely be a bummer for these guys and hence uphold a relatively better IP reputation overall.
As a reminder, hosting is not the only factor that affects your SEO. Your content and code quality also matter at a higher weight.
I don’t think it works like that. IP addresses are scarce, so I’m pretty sure no search engine will put any weight on that. Especially when many websites nowadays use Cloudflare, which entirely masks which provider the site is hosted on, and puts it all on Cloudflare’s shared IPs.
Sure, a provider that’s known for being a safe haven for scam sites may be penalized. But then all their IP addresses will be blocked. A dedicated IP address in a scam network looks much more suspicious than a shared IP from a reputable provider.
I don’t know of any hosting provider that still provides dedicated IPs with web hosting, because there is just no reason to have it.
Let me ask you: if you are searching for something online, do you care where it’s hosted? Do you look up the IP address it’s hosted and use that to determine whether the information shown there is useful?
Because I don’t, and I think very few people do. Rankings are gained by having a fast and user friendly site with relevant, high quality content.
And then remember that search engine companies have been working for decades to provide people with the search results they are looking for. So if there are any characteristics you don’t care about when searching the web, or that don’t realistically help search engines to determine whether the content is relevant, then it’s safe to assume that search engines don’t care either.
Please don’t let people scam you with “SEO optimized hosting”. That’s not how SEO works.
For major infrastructures like Cloudflare, Google has special arrangement with them and has a way of identifying their host IPs, meanwhile there are other methods in judging the IP relationship of a domain as Cloudflare does not process traffic other than web traffic.
Many still do actually, and they are called dedicated VPS. I believe iFastNet has one of those on their top plans, and also other providers as well. While IPv4 is already exhausted, IPv6 is still widely available so that shouldn’t be an issue.
That’s a different product. Virtual private servers typically include a dedicated IP address because the entire idea is that it’s a virtual server assigned to just you. Many projects someone would want to run on a VPS might work ideally with their own IP (such as running a game server for example) but that’s not the main reason someone would want a VPS, nor have I ever encountered somebody renting one for the sole reason of having their own IP address.
The product in question is shared hosting/web hosting. Unlike a VPS which lets you do anything, web hosting is really only designed for running websites. It used to be that some web hosting companies would let you add a dedicated IP address to your shared hosting account at an upcharge, but there aren’t many of them that offer that anymore. Largely due to the IPv4 shortage, but also like the admin said, there just really isn’t a need for it when it comes to websites anymore.
I’ve never seen a web hosting company offer a dedicated IPv6 address for shared hosting accounts, and can’t find any that do. Even though there is a mass supply of them, there still isn’t any advantage to having a dedicated one anymore for the same reason there isn’t a need for a dedicated IPv4 address.
I have to agree with you on this point. Just because you picked a hosting provider who has experienced bad things in the past does not mean you should be punished. One thing search engines don’t want to do is punish people for something they don’t have full control over.
It would not be fair if an IP was marked as “malicious”, and suddenly all the sites hosted on it where demoted without warning.
huh? IP’s being related to spam is more for sending emails and such (eMail is a spot where dedicated IPs are quite a bit more important for bulk sending)
This! And “We can get you to the top of Google in one week”. No! You cannot! That is not how this works!
I’m curious about this point, can you provide evidence to back it up? Maybe I am using the wrong search terms, but I can’t find anything beyond speculation.
Dedicated VPS ≠ Dedicated IP. Multiple servers can use the same IP address, so multiple dedicated servers can be on the same IP. Also, Edward went into this a bit further and made some good points, so read his post
The main reason for someone to have a dedicated VPS is to have dedicated resources, and IP address is one of these resources. Most companies would purchase dedicated infrastructures including VPS to isolate themselves from potential IP abuse or traffic that does not belong to their machine, as it is very likely that their own application getting affected due to their neighbouring site being malicious on the same IP, example includes SEO reporting services, eCommerce sites, banks etc.
This isn’t the case, there are a lot still do, at least 3 more from my point of view as I host some of my sites on them. Amazon, Azure and GCP are definitely on of those allowing you to rent long-term static IPs that is dedicated for the client.
Depends on the client, it’s not something we should define.
AWS
Some businesses nature require a dedicated IPv4 address, especially if they are involved in system integration and IoT systems that directly work with other devices, more then often those clients would have got an ASN of their own to work with.
There is one controversial case where Google punished other sites based on TTFB and has this criteria listed on PageSpeed. Many have argued that the fact of not being able to control the network performance of the hosting has led to a lot of people switching over to GCP. The case then ultimately settled by having these criteria publically removed (you can’t tell if it’s removed internally as well). Skeptically speaking it might be a way to boost GCP sales at the time, and people tend to observe this, yet somehow websites hosted on GCP tend to have higher SEO performance until Cloudflare.
SEO was never fair lol, it really depends on how the search engine classifies the sites, and there’s a relationship scores between domains that has references to each other, but sharing the same IP alone won’t be the only considering factor.
This one I agree, nothing works this way. SEO could take months to do it legitimately. However, there are SEO vendors that has private SEO indexing sites that help suddenly boost a certain domain’s ranking, which I think is not a good practice yet they can be temporarily effective before the domain gets demoted.
It’s quite 2-sided, people say things that support both sides, so I go with what I observed in the field. I do not take whatever the official documents says as I believe you also know what is coporate game.
Anyways, here are the links from my quick search just now.
On a side note, Cloudflare IPs are considered whitelisted in many places, so there has to be some sort of checking to prevent this from mass impact.
True, but this what you can get.
No, dedicated means that the resource is allocated for you, whether that includes an IP is up to the hosting, but in common sense and expectations that is the case.
I do not think that a dedicated IP is going to make your website more trustworthy. IP addresses are recycled as they are low in quantity so if the dedicated IP address that was behind a malicious website in past then here we go.
Yes, this is the part where we compare if the IP is associated with just one, or many websites at the same time. The fact that spam and phishing websites normally won’t survive long and rarely devote the cost to rent a dedicated IP, newcomers often can start fresh much easier given their hosting period is significantly longer than whatever that is on the history. They might start off rough, if having a bad reputed site is even the case, but it will still perform relatively better in the long run.
But if you need that kind of infrastructure, than you wouldn’t be using a shared web hosting account for it, mostly because it would be impossible to have all of that on shared hosting. Some businesses or organizations may choose to tie that kind of system into a website on a shared hosting account, but even if they do the website wouldn’t need to be on the same IP address as anything else (and if for some weird reason, it did, then they wouldn’t be able to host the site on shared hosting anyways).
Although that is true that they offer them, all three of those are cloud computing services, not shared web hosting which is what I’m referring to. Shared hosting is the kind of service that InfinityFree provides, though any paid shared hosting will have more resources and features than any free service. Supporting more script and code types such as server-side javascript or Ruby, is an example of this.
In my experience, IP reputation, at least for websites, rarely boils down to the reputation of a single IP address. If a shared IP is considered harmful, it’s usually because the hosting provider operating that IP is considered sketchy. And if that’s the case, the entire network of that provider will be marked as bad.
So if you get web hosting from a hypothetical “NoRulezHost” with a shared IP or a VPS from the same company with a dedicated IP, it probably won’t matter much for reputation. In either case, you’ll be using an IP from NoRulezHost, which are known for hosting many fraudulent sites, which looks bad on you.
Similarly, a shared IP address from a reputable host won’t be blacklisted because for every bad site there are 100 good sites.
Services that are not shared hosting often do have dedicated IPs, because in many cases there is just no way around it. You can’t put SSH or a mail server behind a shared IP address because the protocol just doesn’t support name based virtual hosting. Or at least not without some intermediary gateway that severely limits the versatility of your own server running behind it.
