Are dedicated IP addresses worth it?

[SamSites]

I have a few domain's hosted with dedicated IP addresses, and some without. There seems to be no difference between traffic etc, aside from the fact that the one's with dedicated IP addresses cost more.

In certain situations is it worth it? For example I see it not being worth it for 1-5 page sites, but what about 20-30? or 40-100? When (if ever) does it become important and why is it important ? I'm a little confused, I can see a different IP has no effect on visitor's, but seo wise, I'm not sure the difference/benefit's either. Can someone clear this up a little bit

Thanks, Sam ;-):-?

 

[namdas]

If you run many websites in different areas you may not want certain people - such as spam teams at search engines - knowing you own them all.

Likewise if you are buying/selling domains you may not want people to know how many pies you are in. In both cases it doesn't matter if the websites have the same WHOIS details, carry Google Analytics, Adsense or are registered with Webmaster Tools.

From a technical standpoint a search engine will assign a 'crawl budget' to an ip address - which basically means they don't want to crash your server so they will asses its performance and only crawl x amount of pages per day. More sites = slower server = less pages crawled. Not a problem if you have lots of 5 page sites but if you have multiple sites with thousands of pages on one IP address you may find Google doesn't index them all - or holds very stale, out of date content.

Consistent poor server performance can also negatively affect your rankings, but I don't think the inverse is true (eg high speed sites != better rankings)

Edit: Also most importantly if you have one or two mission critical sites that make the most of your income, it does make sense to segregate them onto their own dedicated server to reduce the chances of the server crashing - as even one lost afternoon of income can be quite substantial. Skimping on hosting never really makes sense - its pretty damn cheap as it is.

Otherwise you're probably fine

 

[martin-s]

You'll need a dedicated IP if you need an SSL cert - and you'd do well to have one if you're serving email.

Otherwise, it's more about connectivity: RDP onto the desktop, SQL pipes, firewall rules, etc.