pro/cons of virtual hosting services

>   > poole at eunet.ch writes:
>   > > We strongly discourage use of IP address space for virtual hosting
>   > > services because this represents no technical reason to assign more than
>   > > one address to a host.  Therefore it is in conflict with address space
>   > > conservation. 
>   > 
>   > A would strongly suggest that this is a NON-problem, even with the gigantic
>   > increase in WWW servers that we are all experiencing it is hard to see how
>   > this could ever become a serious consideration.
> 
> Unfortunately we have seen some significant address space requests based
> on this.  Note that we are not talking about one additional address per

What is significant?

> organisation served, but one additional address per arbitrary entity
> requiring a virtual server.  Given the boom in http based services this
> may become quite significant. 

We offer the www.customer.nl method with virtual hosts. 1 ip adress per
company, and they ofcourse need to show chamber of commerce papers first
as per dutch domain rules. I really don't see the harm in this.

> To repeat: The second soloution proposed provides all aspects of
> provider independence.  Why should we waste address space if wasting it
> does not provide significant additional functionality? 

Well, the 'significant additional functionality' is your opinion. 
Customers seem to think otherwise, and an ISP has to contiuously make
decisions balancing both RIPE's needs as the customers needs.
And not always does the balance work in RIPE's favour (most of the time
it does :). Although im totally in favour of trying to preserve ip
space, in this case I really believe it is not as significant as it
is portrayed to be. Not as long as it stays within 1 or 2 Class C nets.

Cor

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