Last March 11, I first tasted the Speedy hosting plan from Top Hosting Center. Now, after quite some time of thorough observation, I am ready to give you the verdict of their flagship hosting plan for this season. This post was made particularly for people who want to know the true value of Speedy. THC’s Speedy hosting plan replaced the infamous Rudolf in their web hosting spotlight. Does Speedy deserve the limelight? Let’s find out.
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If you are an online entrepreneur running your own blog or your own e-commerce site over a shared hosting plan, then trust me: your site needs a dedicated IP address. Although your sites will run fine on a shared IP address, you would prefer having a dedicated IP for your online business.

Shared or Dedicated IP Addresses – Say What?

Most shared hosting plans from hosting companies by default offer shared IP addresses to run their customers’ domains.

To be clear, first let us determine the difference between a shared hosting plan and a shared IP address since these are two different things. A shared hosting plan is a hosting account that runs on a single, physical server shared by other users having similar hosting accounts – thus the word “shared.” A shared IP address, on the other hand, is a real address of a website or server. Instead of real IP addresses, a domain name is used for convenience to represent a website. Since a single server can handle multiple domains running on it, these domains could represent one shared IP address. By default, the domains of other users on same shared server are pointing to a common, shared IP address.

Domains hosted on a shared hosting account, however, are not restricted to use only a shared IP address. They can be as well configured individually to be assigned a static, dedicated IP address that is utilized only by a one domain.

For shared hosting plans, a dedicated IP address is usually a premium upgrade to most hosting companies which costs around $2.50 per month. Certain hosting companies like IXWebHosting and Top Hosting Center (to name a few), include dedicated IP addresses to their shared hosting packages which is excellent.

The Impacts Of Having A Dedicated IP Address

Acquiring a dedicated IP address for your domain brings the following benefits:

Scam and Spam Blacklist Protection - In a shared hosting environment, if someone you share with a common IP gets trouble for spamming or scamming, the shared IP address could get blacklisted or banned by Internet Service Providers (ISP) and it would affect all domains using the said shared IP address. When your shared IP address is banned or blacklisted on some ISPs, your website will not be accessible to some areas in the world and your emails get blocked. It would directly affect your online business operations, search engine ranking and reputation. Getting a dedicated IP address resolves this. A dedicated IP isolates your domain and protects it from being affected from the consequences of abuses done by other shared users.

Business Identity Support – With a dedicated IP address, online businesses can have the confidence of better identity. Customers feel unsafe doing monetary transactions on sites that use a shared IP address because of reliability and security issues. A truth about this is that security certificates like private SSL requires a website to run over a dedicated IP address before it can accept credit cards online. Although you can still run an e-commerce site using a shared IP address, through a shared SSL certificate, having your own dedicated IP will make things easier and convince your customers to avail products or services, and close deals.

Enhanced Search Engine Optimization – Search engines track websites through their addresses (domain name and IPs). It has been found that most search engines favor websites running over dedicated IP address. Sites with a dedicated IP addresses do better in ranking on Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). For online businesses, this concern is very important.

Extended Hosting Functionality – Certain functions on a shared hosting plan cannot be enabled if you are using a shared IP address. For instance, Anonymous FTP can only be enabled with a dedicated IP address. Anonymous FTP lets anyone using FTP client software to access the files in a special directory of your site. Also, having a dedicated IP allows access to your website by FTP even if your domain name is still inaccessible due to propagation.

Knowing the benefits of having a dedicated IP address, I strongly encourage you to have it especially when you are running business-related sites and even blog like this. John Raul dot Com just shifted from shared IP to dedicated IP with the coming of THC’s Speedy hosting plan – and it is great.

It has been weeks since I had a comprehensive interview about Top Hosting Center’s (THC) Rudolf hosting plan. Well, just recently, I visited THC and I noticed some changes on their website: the Top Hosting Special and the Rudolf hosting plans are gone (I assume that the 1000th plan has been sold). The thing that drew my attention most was their new shared hosting plan dubbed as “Speedy.” Their banner for Speedy is kind of fancy, but I was silenced when I saw its features.

THC’s Speedy hosting plan presents a fresh and bountiful pool of resources for Web enthusiasts and entrepreneurs. At THC’s web hosting blog, a Speedy-related post mentioned that it was “the company’s greatest standard hosting plan offer they’ve done to date.” For me, it sounds exciting, but a little intriguing as well knowing that their previous Rudolf hosting plan was good enough.

Among its standard hosting features, here are outstanding figures that comprise THC’s Speedy hosting plan:

• FREE Dedicated IP Address – usually this is an add-on to other hosting companies, normally costs at least $2.50 per month. THC had it free for Speedy, which is really good.
• 33 000 GB Monthly Bandwidth – I remember THC offering only 3000 GB bandwidth with their previous hosting plans (including Rudolf).
• 1000 GB Disk Space – Self-explanatory, but great hands down. Previous hosting plans only featured 250 GB, which definitely was a history.
• Free Domain Name – it’s awful to know some hosts (not THC) don’t include a domain name in their hosting plans. They do it usually to look their plans cheaper against their competitors.
• Aggressive Pricing – At THC’s Speedy comparison page, the hosting plan costs as low as $6.75 / month. Commonly, the pricing is dependent to the billing cycle of the hosting plan. I found out that THC had Speedy aggressively-priced, beating all matching hosting packages from other hosting companies such as Host Monster, Dreamhost, Bluehost, Go Daddy and Host Gator. I checked their competitors’ sites and their price comparison was rather true. However, I will have to verify its features further. Sometimes, companies are biased to their own products. I will go find out the truthfulness of their page and whistle blow if I found something fishy.

According to their live chat representatives, their existing Rudolf customers can upgrade to Speedy hosting plan. Honestly, I don’t see so much point about that since Rudolf is already a lifetime plan with just one-time fee. However, I couldn’t blame seeing people moving towards Speedy from Rudolf since it comes with a free dedicated IP address, a terabyte disk space, a jaw-dropping 33,000 GB monthly bandwidth, and other features. Those figures are enough to convince them, as it did to me.

Yes, this blog now runs under Speedy hosting plan. I’m currently assessing the experience and I will write a comprehensive review soon whether it’s really hot or not. Initially I have a positive impression with it, especially knowing that this blog now runs over a dedicated IP address. If you are not aware, having a site running over a dedicated IP address will absolutely favor search engine optimization (SEO), plus it is very good in building legitimate business identity on the Internet, and certainly unleashes extra FTP functionality as well. I will explain in my future post why having a dedicated IP is important especially for online entrepreneurs.

It is very futuristic and has a very competitive lineup of hosting features that will break your worries on hosting.

I recommend that you check THC’s Speedy hosting plan. It is very futuristic and has a very competitive lineup of hosting features that will break your worries on hosting. By the way, if you sign-up for it, I recommend getting a 24-month plan for you to get huge discount – that’s what I got and it was very affordable for me. At least, the setup fee was waived, which would have cost me additional $25 if I got a one-month, 3-month, or 6-month plan.

So enough talk here, I will continue my observation in the back scene and assess this hosting plan for a week. I hope to bring good news from it.

By the way, if you have a product, service, or website related to this blog and you want it to be reviewed by me, check out this post. Let’s have some good time.