Technology has revolutionized business. Now, even the smallest companies can reach audiences around the world thanks to the power of the internet. As you grow your business, there are a variety of different ways you can use technology to not only help you reach larger audiences but also organize your internal networks better. One of the many great tools for businesses looking to scale is using a dedicated IP.
What Is a Dedicated IP Address?
As you probably know, the Internet Protocol or IP is the address that each computer is assigned when connected to a particular network. What you might not be aware of is that many websites share an IP address with sometimes upwards of hundreds of customers under many different domain names.
Typically, most websites begin with a shared IP. And, while it is fine for the initial stages of your company, many businesses shift over to a dedicated IP in the long term.
A dedicated IP is simply having your unique IP address. Depending on your hosting company or your IT support, the process of transitioning from a shared to a dedicated IP can usually be set up in a couple of hours and be finalized in less than two days.
Why Is Having a Dedicated IP Beneficial?
As with so much in business, everything comes back to reputation. What frequently happens is that another website on a shared IP address becomes involved in activities like spamming and phishing. This can present two different problems for you. First, your data may become vulnerable to similar attacks. It’s very easy for hackers to move across different domains on a shared IP.
At the same time, browsers like Chrome and Firefox have built-in protection that will prevent users from visiting unsecured websites while spam filters will likely flag your emails. With your own dedicated IP, you can ensure that your site always stays accessible and doesn’t depend on anybody else’s security.
Increasing the Performance of Your Site
There are many reasons why you want your website to perform well. First, it’s an essential factor in ensuring a quality experience for your users. It will also determine how high your website appears in search engine rankings.
With a dedicated IP, you can increase the performance of your website in a variety of different ways. It helps your website process larger volumes of website traffic, provides more capacity for long-running apps and affords better overall protection for a wide variety of attacks that can shut down your website completely.
And not only that. Should your website be compromised, you can completely isolate the problem and fix it because you are not going through a shared platform. Thus, you don’t have to wait for the host to sort the problem from their end. This means that, instead of your site potentially being down for days or weeks and losing all that traffic, you can fix problems within hours.
Essential for Email Marketing
These days, our email inboxes are so finely tuned that even things that aren’t spam often end up in that folder. And the reason for this is the fact that other companies’ spammy marketing practices affect other users on a shared IP.
The process works like this. There are major companies like TrendMicro and Spamhaus that blacklist IP addresses according to the types of activity that come from them. You may have hundreds of domains sharing an IP, but if just one email account becomes problematic and starts sending out spam, the IP may get blacklisted.
Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other popular Internet Service Providers (ISPs) partner with these companies. And, if an IP address is on the blacklist, then the email will be rejected from the provider. With a dedicated IP, you can control all the information passed through it. In such way, you can ensure that your reputation stays intact and your emails don’t end up blocked or in the spam folder.
For Your Online Store
If your website features an online store, then this is another reason why a dedicated IP address is beneficial. You need to ensure that your customers’ data is safe and encrypted when they make purchases. To do this, you need an SSL certificate.
This is something you may not have noticed but if you look at your URL, it may either be “http://” or “https://.” That “s” makes a big difference and shows that your site is secure. Often, to get it requires having a dedicated IP.
Dedicated IPs Make Sense for a Growing Business
In the early stages of your business, a shared IP should be fine for your needs. However, as your audience grows, it becomes more and more essential to ensure you have a secure site protected by an SSL certificate, a solid reputation for your emails, and the ability to prevent your site from being shut down due to someone else’s vulnerabilities. At the end of the day, a dedicated IP offers the control you need so that you can take advantage of all digital resources available to the modern business.