One of the main reasons why I use a dedicated server today is the possibility of having one or more
dedicated IP addresses.
If I have to create a project for the Finnish market I tend to register a dot if I domain and point
my hosting to an IP address within Finland back in the days when I was still working on share hosting.
Unfortunately the same IP address was assigned to more customers and each customer had dozens of Web
sites.
What was the result of that situation.
It used to happen and still happens today that a website has the same IP as 50 other sites or it is
in the same c class.
For example the IP five dot forty five dot 78 dot two has the same c class 78 as five dot forty five
dot seventy eight dot 18 in order to save on infrastructure costs hosting companies often decide to
host hundreds of customers within the same c class block called an IP neighborhood having even ten thousand
sites on extremely close IP addresses.
But what if one of these 50 or ten thousand websites is a spam portal contains illegal content or does
something bad in my opinion and considering the experience described in the previous chapter being in
this situation certainly does not bring any advantages from the SRO perspective especially if we think
in terms of authority trust and relevance.
The alternative is to check the IP in the so-called blacklists in order to make sure it is a clean IP.
This condition should be checked pretty often and therefore I have created a special tool for this on
get SEO fix dot com slash tools.
This does not mean that all sites on shared hosting are penalized but in my opinion there is a risk
which a serious business should not take even if it is only a potential risk.
I don't want to get into technicalities but we need to know that a reverse proxy is a sort of network
interface interposed between the user and the recipient server the most famous service is CloudFlare
dot com which except for some limitations is free.
By using this mechanism the servers IP address is not directly visible externally and this provides
some advantages.
Security the interface already contains a firewall that blocks malicious requests and Medicaid's de
dos distributed denial of service attacks load balancing the traffic load can be distributed to multiple
internal servers in order to optimize performance caching an intermediate server immediately provide
some recurring answers without having to continuously contact the main server but what does this all
mean exactly.
From an NCO perspective surely the performance is facilitated and therefore the user experience is automatically
improved.
But at what cost instead of showing our IP address externally to the public and to search engines the
reverse proxy service is shown.
We need to be confident that it's clean from all those effects of an IP address neighborhood which we
talked about earlier during these years.
I have tested these servers several times and I have never had any problems lately.
However I tend to avoid them because having dedicated servers I prefer to do a private configuration
without the risk of being penalized by an IP address that is out of my control.
As it happens with the most part of reverse proxy services.