Two main reasons why dedicated IP is needed:
1. better search engine
- many different opinions on this, but it looks that dedicated IP seems to be helpful for search engine result
2. SSL support
- e-commerce website needs SSL which requires a unique IP address.
One note is that webfaction.com does not provide dedicated IP but private IP address.
Private IP address is a bit different from dedicated IP.
If you typed http://64.233.187.99/ into your web browsers address bar you would see Goggle’s web site come up. This is their dedicated IP address and no one else’s.
Private IP address does not support the above (#1) but it can support SSL (#2).
