All of my websites use the same IP, why?

Our company provides a cloud web hosting service designed for personal, community and business websites.

Rather than buying a dedicated server for each website, you can host your site on a server with other users. The service where many websites are hosted on one physical server is called cloud web hosting.

The easiest way to explain this is to put it that way: each site is hosted in a user account on the server, separated from the other users on the same server.

While each hosting account is independent from the other accounts on the same server, there is something they all share by default - it is the IP, the network address, of the server. The same goes for the domains and subdomains hosted in the same hosting account - they all share the IP of the server. This is why this IP address is called a "shared IP".

Because the IP is shared by all the hosts (domains and subdomains), the visitors will not be able to reach a specific website by simply typing the IP address of the server in their browser's address bar. Instead, the visitors should type the domain name of your website. When the web browser requests an address from a web server from our network, it includes the requested hostname (domain or subdomain) as a part of the request. The server then uses this information to determine which website is being requested. So, the fact that all your websites share the same IP address does not affect your visitors or the productivity of your websites.

In some cases you may require a dedicated IP - a unique network address, which you do not share with other users. For example, when you want to use an SSL Certificate, which encrypts the connection between your website and your visitors, you need a dedicated IP for your domain.