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The End of the Internet Is Near- IP Address Shortage, or so says a recent article in the London Times.
The end of the Internet is near — and in less than three years, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The reason? More than 85% of the available addresses have already been allocated and the OECD predicts we will have run out completely by early 2011.
These aren’t the normal web addresses you type into your browser’s window, and which were recently freed up by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the body responsible for allocating domain names, to allow thousands of new Internet domains ending in, for instance, .newyork, .london or .xxx.
Beneath those names lie numerical Internet protocol addresses that denote individual devices connected to the Internet. These form the foundation for all on line communications, from e-mail and web pages to voice chat and streaming video.
When the current IP address scheme was introduced in 1981, there were fewer than 500 computers connected to the Internet. Its founders could be forgiven for thinking that allowing for a potential 4 billion would last for ever. However, less than 30 years later, the Internet is rapidly running out. Every day thousands of new devices ranging from massive web servers down to individual mobile phones go online and gobble up more combinations and permutations.
“Shortages are already acute in some regions,” says the OECD. “The situation is critical for the future of the Internet economy.”
As addresses run dry we will all feel the pinch: Internet speeds will drop and new connections and services will either be expensive or simply impossible to obtain. The solution to the IP address shortage is an upgrade to new addresses that can accommodate our hunger for online connectivity. Such a system, called IPv6, was agreed more than a decade ago, providing enough addresses for billions upon billions of devices as well as improving Internet phone and video calls, and possibly even helping to end e-mail spam.
So where are all these IPs going? Well a lot of places really but hundreds of thousands of them are wasted each and every day. What most people don’t know is that each website you have (ie: All4U.com) doesn’t have to have their own dedicated IP address. It could very well share an IP with 25 of their friends but in doing so you run the very serious risk of search engine penalties so “search search engine experts” advise that you get your own dedicated IP for every domain you own from your web hosting company. I mean after all, you don’t want to risk sharing an IP address with a website that just got banned from Google or black listed from Yahoo, now do you? Of course not!!
Although there is no other real “PROOF” that having your own IP improves your search engine rankings, experts are still convinced of it and to be honest, so am I. I’ve seen a website go from #34 to #7 just by moving the domain to its own dedicated IP. Could have just been a major coincidence but who really wants to take the risk of their sites losing search engine traffic for not having their own dedicated iP?
And herein lies the problem. So what is a good webmaster to do? The truth is, I don’t know. However I can tell you a few creative solutions that some webmasters may begin to resort to. This won’t help you if you are put in an IP block with a banned or search engine blacklisted website but it will help you with the “supposed” penalties from shared IPs. Basically let’s say you have 20 websites. In theory you would host them all on one server. Obviously that makes most sense but if we get forced to share IPs what will we ever do? You can take two or three of your websites and put them with other hosting companies. But this will cost you even more money per month. Use those websites hosted elsewhere and link back to your other sites created sort of a network of sites. This should help you with the websites that are getting minor penalties for shared IPs with your other website but you still run the risk of sharing an IP with a site run by someone who does something to get banned or blacklisted and then you’ll have a whole other mess on your hand but in the end, what else can you really do about it?
