Does Your Hosting Company Keep Your Website Secure and Safe?
When you’re using a web host, you want to ensure that your security is completely there. Why? Because depending on the type of hosting plan you get, this also depends on the security you’re going to get as well. Most of the time, there is a difference between the two primary types of hosting (shared hosting, and dedicated hosting), and the same thing somewhat applies when it comes to a shared IP address and a dedicated one for your website. The thing to consider is when you really need to get a dedicated IP address. In this article, we’ll talk about IP addresses and web security for you.
Why Get a Dedicated IP Address via my Web Host?
If you’re running a site where you’re going to keep it secure with an SSL certificate, or you have a lot of traffic, you may want to consider a dedicated IP address from a top hosting company. Another good reason is if you’re using file transfer (FTP) on a regular basis, or if you need to view your site specifically by IP address for any reason yourself, then you may want to make sure you’re getting a dedicated address. This doesn’t mean though that if you get dedicated hosting that you’re not sharing an IP address or gateway. The same thing applies for shared hosting. If your website is provided to you on a server with shared hosting, but you have an SSL certificate included in your package, you can play it safe; you probably have a dedicate IP assigned to your webpage or user directory.
Can a Dedicated IP Address Help with SEO?
While in the past, it was considered and even documented that having a dedicated IP address that your site was hosted on didn’t matter, but now the year is much later, algorithms frequently have changed and things are more specific. While you can still benefit from a website being on a server with a shared IP address, you can think of it like a DSL connection in a city. More users, equals less bandwidth. Therefore, with a dedicated IP address, you’ll have your own bandwidth. Pages and websites load faster on a dedicated IP address because the data can be sent faster. While in the past, Google didn’t include this, they now consider ranking by page load speed a huge deal (this goes hand in hand with mobile loading too).
More Flexibility
When you have a dedicated IP address versus a shared IP, you’ll have more uptime, and you can actually help your website improve in search engine optimization by how fast it loads. But that’s really the only benefit.
Conclusion
With shared hosting, you can still have that dedicated IP address, but there are many sites that will show you that you may have a shared IP address. If you do, you may want to invest in upgrading to a dedicated hosting plan so you can have that dedicated IP, and if they don’t offer that, you might want to change hosts. This will help you fight spammers and scammers as well with the right security packages attached to your hosting plan.
