IP's, trustworthiness, VPS services, SEO and the kitchen sink

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.

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