Christian Little

Web hosts normally provide customers with two types of IP address for their sites. These two types are static IP addresses or shared IP addresses. Shared web hosting involves your site being given a portion of space on the web host’s server. There will be many different types of websites all sharing space on the server and all sharing the same IP address. Sharing an IP address is suitable for those sites that are not too concerned with security such as blogs or informational sites.

However if you have an ecommerce site it is recommended that you use a static IP address. Likewise if you have a website that is holding confidential information, you would also need a static IP address. Static IP addresses do not change and if you need to use SSL encryption on your site you will have to have a static IP address. SSL encryption is required in order to make sure that any confidential data travelling to and from your site is encrypted. This stops any of this data from being seen by the wrong person. If you want to use SSL encryption you will not be able to have a shared IP address.

It is also necessary for you to have a static IP address in order to facilitate ftp transfers. Your site must have a static IP address if your website allows users to download files. The use of static IP addresses is usually for either one or both of the above reasons.

Although you do not need to worry too much about security for your site if it is not an ecommerce site. If your site is just there to make you money from ads, then you do not need to worry about static IP addresses. Another reason you can forget about static IP addresses is if your site does not facilitate ftp transfers.

Anybody thinking about venturing into internet marketing should have hosting dealt with beforehand. Newbie’s can find, though, that the web hosting world can be rather confusing. For instance, you could find reseller web hosting or even linux web hosting on your travels.