There was an interesting post on Jim Boykin blog about hosting your website on a unique personal IP address. Some people think that if your site is hosted and associated with a spammy site on the same IP you can be banned or suffer the effect of Google punishing that other site.

First of all here is the tool that will check if your website has it’s on IP.

http://www.seologs.com/ip-domains.html

Danny Sullivan responds

it’s been a really long time since I’ve heard of someone innocently being wiped out because they were on a shared IP. Instead, you hear more about someone who was massively spamming and lost all their sites, since they were on the same IP.

And here is my take on this issue.

Google might use this IP information when trying to detect multiple sites from the same owner. This might be used for duplicate content or other techniques one might use with multiple websites. I did hear people lose their rankings on all of their sites when they were on the same IP. Basically, one triggered the others.

Having said that … I have not heard of a site being punished because it was hosted on the same IP as a totally different website that’s got blacklisted by Google. I do suggest though having your own IP and you should if you pay a bit more for hosting.