Switching between Virtual Hosting (Shared IP) and IP Based Hosting (Dedicated IP)

[Axe Solutions]

The system offers 2 kinds of IP:

1. Shared IP - one IP address is assigned to several domains and access to a domain is available only by its domain name;
2. Dedicated IP - one IP address is assigned to one domain. To access a domain you can use either its IP address or its domain name.

Shared IP is used by more than one virtual hosts. This approach is known as name-based Virtual Host Support, as opposed to the traditional IP-based Virtual Host approach. The traditional approach is hard to implement on some machines, so Shared IP is used to avoid assigning a dedicated IP address to every virtual host.

The benefits of using the new name-based virtual host support are:

* virtually unlimited number of servers;
* ease of configuration and use;
* no additional hardware of software requirements.

The main disadvantage is that the client must support this part of the protocol. Also, which is critical for Control Panel, shared IP does not allow to create FTP Virtual Hosts.

Dedicated IP is a paid service. You need a Dedicated IP to create Virtual FTP. This service uses SSL on your web server. Switching back from Dedicated IP to Shared IP will remove any of your FTP and SSL resources.

By default every domain has a Shared IP. Shared IP is free. You can change the type of IP at any time as you work with the system. To change the type of the IP, click the Change to Shared/Dedicated IP link in the Edit Domain page.

You can use IP-only server. To create it, choose "no domain" item during signup. Following the signup, you should change type of IP to Dedicated.