It does no such thing. If money were sufficient justification, the IPv4 pool would have been exhausted a *long* time ago.

I am paying 60$ for VPS .. hostgator users get 2-4 for 20$. Do you see what's not really fair in this? Don't get me wrong!
I moved to Linode and I am very happy and never will go back but this IP problem is really drives me crazy.

Well then either Hostgator has more "reserves" in their allocation than Linode does, or they're not playing by ARIN's rules as far as justification goes.

Then you're being driven crazy by a fake problem. Search engines don't care about the number of IP addresses you control. (There are more SEO things that search engines don't care about, but that's not relevant here.)

Let me start by saying I don't need any additional IP's, just an observation here.

I think IP allocation should be a case by case basis. What if I happen to host 2 websites that are from opposing organizations. This could cause a conflict, albeit petty, but try explaining that to your client So now I have to get another node and thereby another IP, even though all sites will run fine on one nodes resources. I'm sure there are more examples of why someone would need another IP other than SSL.

I'm not saying Linode should revamp their policies, I'm saying ARIN should

Is the idea to have multiple IP addresses pointing to the site somehow, so that they look like separate web sites linking to you or something? I don't understand the need for multiple IP addresses here.

James

This happens all the time, and nobody notices nor cares. Consider shared hosting providers. IP addresses are meaningless, and humans never see them unless they look. (Consider www.reddit.com, www.foxnews.com, and www.whitehouse.gov...)

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That is not true. DirectAdmin is by default installed on plain http. Then if you install a ssl certificate for the main ip, it will work without problems. There is no fake certs, unless you choose to install a self signed ssl certificate instead of buying a real one.

You need to buy a ssl certificate and have the knowledge on how to install it correctly.

I am using DirectAdmin on my Linode main ip, and using a valid ssl certificate, and it works great.

cPanel/WHM requires 2 IPs if you're intending to have a secure customer website as well as run all the WHM/cPanel services.

1 IP with self-signed SSL used for default WHM & cPanel services such as mail, login etc. E.g. host.xyz.com/cpanel
1 additional IP required for the customer site secured with a purchased SSL cert, www.xyz.com/customers

I queried with Linode support yesterday about getting an additional IP address for this purpose and they were quite happy to allow an extra IP for this justification.

Yes, that's exactly the idea. And multiple IP addresses definitely helps. If you own 4 websites and they're all on the same IP address then cross-linking them will look fishy. Do the same thing from 4 different IP addresses and it's a whole different ball game.

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No, it does not. Repeat after me: Search engines do not care about IP addresses being the same. They do care about the quality of the content. If you're setting up a link farm, search engines will dislike that, whether you host them all on a single IP address or a hundred.

You do realise that you will have to qualify that statement or you are going to look silly?

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Sure. There is no benefit for search engines to penalize for the number of sites hosted on a single IP address. Now you qualify your own statement about search engines caring about it

As I posted before, search engines (especially Google) care about the content, not some irrelevant technical details. Make sure the content's okay before worrying about minutiae like the number of sites hosted on a single address.

First of all, you don't know that. And even if you know for one search engine, that doesn't mean the same thing applies to all search engines. Furthermore, I didn't say that they penalized based on the amount of sites on one IP address (that would be silly), I said that cross-linking may be a problem.



Not a problem for me to do that for you. I am reasonable after all.

Matt Cutts from Google talks about the problem of cross-linking here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufGw65-1je8

Surely you can see why it would then be a good idea to have your websites on different IP addresses if you plan to do any artificial linking like that.

On top of that, even though it is anecdotal evidence, I have seen traffic to one of my sites drop (on the order of 25%) on 3 separate occassions after linking to it from another website I host on the same IP address. I did it 3 times over a period of 9 months to test the theory.



I thoroughly agree with this.

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Matt Cutts doesn't mention anything about IP addresses in that video. What he indirectly talks about, is linking to relevant content (ie. what makes sense linking to), and link farms (30 or 300 seemingly random and irrelevant links).

As zr40 pointed out, different IP addresses to websites is a minor detail that search engines do not care about. Content is a lot more relevant.