{"id":207517,"date":"2023-02-02T15:52:00","date_gmt":"2023-02-02T14:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spotler.com\/blog\/the-real-effect-of-dedicated-ips"},"modified":"2026-08-03T16:02:52","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T14:02:52","slug":"the-real-effect-of-dedicated-ips","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/spotler.com\/en-au\/blog\/the-real-effect-of-dedicated-ips","title":{"rendered":"The real effect of dedicated IPs"},"content":{"rendered":"

More than once a week, someone asks us for a dedicated IP address for their account. And we get it: dedicated IPs have been romanticised over the years as the ultimate solution to every deliverability problem. But, there’s more to the story here. It’s the reason we almost always say ‘no’ to this request, and the reason the exceptions matter too.<\/strong><\/p>\n

First, what’s an IP address?<\/h2>\n

Every domain on the internet is connected to an Internet Protocol (IP) address<\/a>. It’s how we find websites on the internet, and also how we determine where an email is sent from. Typically, when using an email delivery system (like ours<\/em>), you’re one of many senders sharing a few IP addresses. In some cases (unlike ours<\/em>), that means you might also be sharing your IP address with people who have other, sometimes illegitimate, intentions.<\/p>\n

If people on the shared IP send out a lot of spam, there’s a high risk that IP address ends up on a spam filter. The spammer drops the IP and moves on to the next one, but you’re left with an address that has a poor reputation. In Dutch, we have a saying: a great neighbour is better than a faraway friend<\/em>, and that definitely applies to IP reputation. So when things go wrong, it makes sense to fall for the charm of a dedicated IP.<\/p>\n

Why?<\/strong> Well, a dedicated IP address is an IP address that’s dedicated to your email domain: no one else can send from it except the domain you allow. Often sold as a ‘bonus’, you pay a bit of money and, hey presto, you no longer depend on other senders to maintain your reputation with inbox providers and spam filters.<\/p>\n

But there’s a catch.<\/p>\n

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The difficulties of dedicated IPs<\/h2>\n

When you start sending your emails through a dedicated IP, you become responsible for its reputation<\/strong>. That means you have to build everything yourself, from the beginning. If your provider ‘warms up’ the IP for you, it isn’t really dedicated any more. A genuinely new, dedicated IP address is completely fresh: it has no reputation at all with the inboxes you’re trying to reach. That doesn’t mean nothing gets delivered, but you do have to build and maintain that reputation yourself to guarantee delivery.<\/p>\n

Building and protecting your reputation<\/h3>\n

Starting from scratch, you need to send a lot (read: millions) of legitimate emails every single month. Stop sending and you’ll water down your historic reputation. Send a batch of spammy emails and your reputation takes a serious hit. Every slip-up is yours to fix.<\/p>\n

Shift of responsibility<\/h3>\n

The real reason many providers offer dedicated IPs as a product is mainly to shift responsibility. Using their platform is costly enough already. Still, they’ll tell you to use a dedicated IP to get away from the mess they’ve made of their own shared IP pools. And one dedicated IP alone is risky, as shown above, so you’ll usually need at least two.<\/p>\n

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High IP reputation, dedicated IP optional<\/h2>\n

Getting a dedicated IP address to escape spamming neighbours is a solution to a situation that shouldn’t have happened in the first place. Our approach: we make sure the shared IP addresses we use are of such high quality, and such consistent reputation, that the vast majority of senders never have to think about it. Curious? Have a look at the IP addresses in this SenderScore report<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We also vet new customers’ sending activity, make sure they’ve implemented email authentication<\/a> (SPF, DKIM and DMARC), and stick to email sending best practices. On top of that, we continuously monitor for blocklisting, spikes in spam complaints or bounces, and any other signs of misuse on our platform.<\/p>\n

When a dedicated IP actually makes sense<\/h3>\n

There’s a small group of senders for whom the maths works differently: businesses sending genuinely large, consistent volumes, month after month. If you’re sending millions of messages with a stable, well-managed programme, you may well have the scale and the operational discipline to build and protect your own IP reputation. For that specific profile, a dedicated IP can make sense, and a handful of Spotler SendPro customers do run on one for exactly that reason.<\/p>\n

That’s the exception, though, not the rule. It works for those customers because their volume is high enough, and consistent enough, to earn a strong reputation on its own. It isn’t a shortcut, and we wouldn’t recommend it unless your sending volume is genuinely substantial. For everyone else, a dedicated IP mostly means inheriting all the responsibility described above, for no real benefit over what you already get from our shared pool.<\/p>\n

The dedicated IP dream<\/h2>\n

Are you desperately looking to solve your email deliverability issues? For almost everyone, a dedicated IP isn’t the answer. It sounds like the perfect solution to a difficult, costly problem, but it’s usually better to avoid the problem than to solve it. At Spotler, we take the worry out of your IP reputation and, if your volume genuinely warrants a dedicated IP, we’ll have that conversation with you directly. <\/p>\n

Want to know more?<\/strong> Check out Spotler SendPro<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What exactly is a ‘dedicated IP’? And does using dedicated IPs really help your email deliverability? We explain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":68,"featured_media":207518,"template":"","cat_product":[],"cat_industry":[],"cat_topic":[2671],"class_list":["post-207517","blog","type-blog","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","cat_topic-deliverability-en-int"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spotler.com\/en-au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blog\/207517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spotler.com\/en-au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blog"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spotler.com\/en-au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/blog"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spotler.com\/en-au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/68"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spotler.com\/en-au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blog\/207517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":256639,"href":"https:\/\/spotler.com\/en-au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blog\/207517\/revisions\/256639"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spotler.com\/en-au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/207518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spotler.com\/en-au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"cat_product","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spotler.com\/en-au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cat_product?post=207517"},{"taxonomy":"cat_industry","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spotler.com\/en-au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cat_industry?post=207517"},{"taxonomy":"cat_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spotler.com\/en-au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cat_topic?post=207517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}