Today I would like to outline the difference between two IP variations: static and dedicated IPs. An IP address is a unique numerical (or alpha-numerical for IPv6) identifier for each device connected to a network. This includes computers, printers, phones, tablets, gaming consoles, smart devices and more.

Static IP

Static IPs and dynamic IPs are used by ISPs (Internet Servers Providers). Each time you start surfing the Internet or connect to Wi-Fi, your device (PC/laptop/tablet/phone) identifies itself in the worldwide network using an IP address that your ISP has provided you with. You can even find the location of this IP address using special tools, like iplocation.net.  The location reported here is usually the geographic location that the IP address was registered, but the user can be miles away from that location. By the way, you can find out your current IP address at our website.

In your local network, your PC may have a static IP, but it is for your internal network only (usually such IPs start with 192.169.XX.XX or 10.0.0.XX). In this particular article, however, we will be focusing on external IPs in the Internet.

If your ISP provides you with a static IP address, it means that your external IP address will not be changed. This is helpful in many cases. For example, you have set up a game server on your home PC that has IP 22.222.222.222. Your friends can connect to your game server any time using that same IP because you’ve got a static IP that won’t change. Some other benefits to having a static IP – you can access your home PC via remote desktop, setup a VPN, etc. without being concerned that the IP has changed suddenly and without your knowledge. Having a static IP address is a really handy feature.

If each time you connect to the Internet (or other times such as each day, when you have to restart your modem, etc.) your external IP is changed, it means that your ISP provides you with a dynamic IP. It is convenient for the ISP, since they can spread the “load” and give different customers different IP addresses.

In some areas, static IPs can cost a fair sum of money over your normal service cost. If this is the case, you can use a 3rd party service like noip.com to replace your dynamic IP with accountname.no-ip.info. I won’t get into details here, but you can find more info about at the link above.

Let’s move on!

Dedicated IP

When it comes to static and dedicated IPs, a dedicated IP is used by hosting companies. All servers in datacenters already have static IPs, otherwise hosting would not work that well. Think if your PC didn’t know what IP to connect to when you enter www.domain.com in your browser because the IP keeps changing! Servers usually have a number of static IPs assigned to them used for different purposes.

If we speak about shared servers, the main IP address that is used for hosting websites is called a shared IP, because it is shared by numerous different websites. Usually, this is not a problem and everything works fine, however, there is a number of cases when a dedicated IP will be needed.

A dedicated IP assumes that your website has it’s own IP address that is not shared with other domains/websites. There are many cases in which you will need a dedicated IP:

1. Your own nameservers. If you are a reseller and own the domain reseller.com, you can sell this domain and earn a huge amount of money! Joking, naturally :). Let’s assume you are a reseller with domain myreseller123.com under glowhost.com and you would like to use your private nameservers of ns1.myreseller123.com and ns2.myreseller123.com instead of using ns1.glowhost.com and ns2.glowhost.com. This will prevent you from showing all of your customers that you are hosting under glowhost.com as a reseller.

2. SSL certificates. The latest browsers and cPanel supports SSL certificates hosted on shared IPs, but it can be better to use the SSL certificate on a dedicated IP. This way, when connections between your PC and your website (using a dedicated IP that hosts only one domain) is secured you can be assured that other websites don’t get access to that IP.

3. Other, less common needs. For example, if you need to establish a direct connection from your website to another website and the destination host will whitelist your IP, usually they will do this only if it is dedicated (not shared with others) for security.

Concerned about security? Let our specialists deal with the security of your servers. We are good at it!
I suggest keeping in mind that the world is going to run out of IPv4 addresses soon, like 22.222.222.222 I have used as an example, so dedicated IPs are going to become more expensive. The world is slowly switching to IPv6 addresses, since they offer larger amount of possible IPs to use. For reference, these alpha-numerical addresses look like: 2001:0db8:11a3:09d7:1f34:8a2e:07a0:765d.

I hope that answers some common questions regarding IP addresses. Feel free to leave your comments! Thank you for reading.