Will my site have a dedicated IP address?

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By default, sites on our hosting service use “shared” IP addresses for IPv4 (our IPv6 addresses are always dedicated).

It’s possible to upgrade to a “dedicated IP address” for an additional fee, although most customers don’t need to do so.

On this page:

What is a "dedicated IP address"?

A dedicated IP address simply means that no other site uses the same IP address. Most people don’t need a dedicated IP address, but reasons to get one may include:

You don’t need one to improve your search engine rankings, though. That’s a myth (see below).

How can I get a dedicated IP address?

You can upgrade to a dedicated IP address for an additional $2.00 per month (per domain name).

To switch to a dedicated IP address:

  1. Login to the “My Account” control panel (having trouble?).
  2. If your account is a web hosting account, click Domain Name Options (this step is not necessary if the domain name is an alias).
  3. Click Edit DNS Zone.
  4. Scroll down to the “Dedicated IP address” section and click switch the site to a dedicated IP address.
  5. Click Enable dedicated IP address, then Save Changes.

The page will show you the dedicated IP address of your site.

Aren't shared IP addresses undesirable?

A shared IP address should have no effect on how your site works. There's rarely a technical need for a dedicated IP address, and ARIN — the organization that assigns IP addresses — requires us to use shared addresses in most cases.

People sometimes ask this question because of a rumor that dedicated IP addresses improve search engine rankings. That's a myth, though. Many of the highest ranking sites on the Internet share their IP address with hundreds or thousands of other websites.

Dedicated IP addresses also used to be required for an SSL certificate. However, we now use Server Name Indication for this.

Can I get a “static IP address”?

We're sometimes asked if we offer “static IP addresses”, or if a “dedicated IP address” and a “static IP address” are the same thing. They’re similar, but not exactly the same. We offer dedicated IP addresses, but we (like almost all other companies) don’t offer permanently static IP addresses.

A “dedicated” IP address means you're the only customer using it. We try hard to make sure it won’t change, and that it always points at your website, even when things change on our end. But it’s still possible that the IP address might need to change in the future for some reason we can’t yet anticipate (we’ll let you know if this happens).

The literal meaning of a “static” IP address would be an IP address that never changes in the future, even if you keep your hosting with us for decades (yes, we have customers that have been hosting with us for more than 20 years!). We don’t have any way to guarantee that, so we don’t want to promise it. Dedicated IP addresses are much less likely to change than shared IP addresses (because many of the situations that would cause a shared address to change won’t apply), but you shouldn’t assume that even a dedicated IP address will never change.

Do you provide reverse DNS entries for dedicated IP addresses?

Yes. If your site is on a dedicated IP address with us, the reverse DNS entry for that IP address will automatically be set to match your domain name instead of a generic hostname.

Can I use a dedicated IP address in a URL to access my website?

No. A dedicated IP address won't allow you to use the address in a URL like "http://192.0.2.17/". You always need to use the correct domain name to connect to our servers, whether or not you have a dedicated IP address. The server needs to know the domain name to ensure it’s showing the right files and using the right SSL certificate.

If you’re trying to point other domain names at an IP address that serves a site you already have with us, the right way to do it is to instead have us set up the other domain names as aliases. That way we’ll provide DNS service for them that always points at the correct IP address, even if it changes.

How do I view a site I'm transferring if I can’t access it using the IP address?

If you’re trying to find your server’s IP address for testing purposes during a hosting transfer, you should use the temporary "customers.tigertech.net" hostname we provide instead.

Does this affect outgoing connections from scripts on my site?

Even if you have a dedicated IPv4 address for your site, outbound TCP or UDP connections made by your scripts may not automatically use it as the source address. For example, your script might choose your site’s IPv6 address instead, or the server’s default IPv4 address.

To force it to use your dedicated IPv4 address, you would need to have a programmer change your script to “bind” outgoing connections to that source address. Doing that should work properly.

For example, if you’re using the PHP cURL interface, you could do that with curl_setopt CURLOPT_INTERFACE, like this: 

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "https://example.com/");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_INTERFACE, "192.0.2.17");
curl_exec($ch);

The same thing will work for your site’s dedicated IPv6 address if you want to force that: 

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "https://example.com/");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_INTERFACE, "2001:db8::1:2:cafe");
curl_exec($ch);

Doing something like this guarantees that your script will make an outgoing connection from exactly the address you want.

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