What is a Dedicated IP Address

Each computer connected to the Internet is identified by a unique number so other hosts on the Internet can find it and direct data to/from it.

Because the initial pool of IP addresses were estimated at around 4.4 billion during it's introduction in 1983, IP addresses were handed out to large corporations and research institutions upon request with little or no restriction. In the mid-90s, with the exploding popularity of the world wide web and the mass-market introduction of the Internet, IP address space began to be assigned out at a much higher rate. Realizing that the IP address space would eventually run out, there were several methods of extending the life of the IP address space while engineers worked on a new mechanism for identifying computers on the Internet. Current reports and studies estimate the IP addresses to run out by 2010.

One of these methods was the introduction of "shared" hosting, where several web sites and domains could be hosted on one web server. This allowed multiple sites to use the same IP address and connection. For examples, if 50 websites could be identified by one IP address, then that leave 49 potential IP addresses to be used for 50 more websites each, meaning that a company can use 2500 websites with only 50 IP addresses.

However, in some cases, there might be a need for a site to be identified by an IP address that is not shared with other sites on that server. In a shared hosting services, this is usually called a Dedicated IP Address.



Back to SSL FAQ
Back to Main

Ref.
http://www.nic.ad.jp/en/ip/ipv4pool/∞
http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/index.html∞