Into the Internet & web hosting world, one word that you will always get to hear a lot of time is IP Addresses. Shared and Static are the two basic IP addresses which are normally used in hosting. To understand the difference between both the IP addresses you need to know the meaning of IP.
Whenever, you insert a website name in your browser – (www.example.com) that name is translated into some numbers (known as an IP address) and then the computer is headed towards that IP address which is the web site. All the web sites on the internet are established not by its domain name but by its IP address. IP addresses are in the format similar to 192.168.0.48, four discreet blocks separated by periods. You can reach a site by typing in the IP address alone and that will take you directly to the site.
For Ex: www.google.com resolves (turns into) 209.85.129.99. So if you type in 209.85.129.99 directly into your browsers address bar you will be redirected to the home page of this site.
Every web site on internet has an IP address provided to it. For example, every single website on this server does not use different IP addresses. If every site used a different IP address there could potentially be a problem with running out of IP addresses. (Fortunately this is not a problem and is going to be resolved when a new IP address standard is fully adopted).
There are so many sites that runs on one IP address on a server. For example: joeswebsite.com and maryswebsite.com both sites are using the same IP address. Using more than one IP address frees up IP address which are a limited resource. Basically what happens is that when joeswebsite.com is resolved into the IP address, the person looking for joeswebsite.com arrives at the server; the server then realizes that the person is looking for joeswebsite.com and sends that page to the person requesting it. The server basically steps in and does a millisecond of work and saves an IP address.
The use of multiple sites on an IP address is known as Sharing IP’s or a Shared IP address. A particular site having its own IP address, and doesn’t share with any site, it is know as Static IP address. You can always reach a site which has a static IP address by using its IP address alone, but you can’t reach a site using a shared IP address by typing in the IP address alone because when you type in a shared IP address you arrive at the server but the server doesn’t know which site you want because you haven’t told it which domain name you want. So looking at our example above, we typed in 209.85.129.99 and aimed at www.google.com, we know that only www.google.com uses this address as we can get to site without typing in a domain name and thus it must be a static IP address. However, do you know why you need a static IP address?
The main reason for having a static IP address is that you can use SSL encryption Certificate (the thing that makes e-commerce happen) only on a static IP address. In order for a person to transfer sensitive data over the internet at times, this data must be encrypted to prevent someone from intercepting the information. You can only use this encryption (called SSL Certificate) when the web site has its own IP address (static IP). It doesn’t work on a shared IP. So when a website takes in order with a person’s credit card it needs to encrypt this data and it uses SSL with its static IP.
Another cause for having a static IP address is that if a web site wishes to have anonymous ftp transfers (basically where anyone can download files off a site) the site needs to have a static IP address to handle the anonymous ftp transfer. Besides these two causes you don’t need to have your own IP address for a web site.
Hence, while choosing an IP address for your website doesn’t forget to consider these points.
Posted under Webhosting
This post was written by admin on March 24, 2009
