Many of us who still are beginners in web hosting industry didn't really know what is Dedicated IP/Static IP and is it really required to have dedicated IP for your site ?.  Also is there any difference between having dedicated IP and shared IP. In this article, I will try to explain and elaborate as much as possible so you can have better understanding and decide whether you really need them.

As the IP Address is getting harder and harder to get, most web hosting companies do not offer dedicated IP to their hosting account. So basically when you host your site with them, you are sharing your IP Address with other web sites and one IP address is normally shared by hundreds or even millions of sites.

This brings us to, the question of , how does it work, how does it know how to load my site and is there any performance issue when your site IP Address is shared between other web sites?

The answer is that all the web request is handled by the Web Server, and the web server will load the your site based on the host header or virtual host name that your site is configured.

For example if the web server has 5 websites and all are sharing one IP, then the Network Admin has to configure host header or virtual host that is unique to your site such as www.yourdomain.com to your site.

And there is no performance benefit on using dedicated IP over shared IP. It all depends on your hosting provider bandwidth.

So what is the reason why people want dedicated IP?. The main reason is if your planning to use SSL on your site, then you need dedicated IP. If not then either static IP or shared IP doesn't make any difference in the world.