IP assignment for virtual webhosting

In response to Nurani Nimpuno:

> In recent years we have seen a boom in the registration of second-level
> domains. This has led to a great demand for webhosting services. Using one
> IP address per domain uses an enormous amount of IP addresses. With HTTP
> 1.1 this is no longer necessary. We therefore suggest to promote namebased
> webhosting and to change the current policy so that IP addresses can no
> longer be assigned for IP-based webhosting.

I would agree with _promoting_ name-based web hosting but not with
actually _prohibiting_ IP-based web hosting.  We have got some clients
who want to have a separate IP address for their web site so that they
can point multiple domains at it, possibly domains registered by other
parts of their company with a different ISP.  We see this for example
with customers who are multi-national companies and want
www.customer.co.uk www.klant.nl , www.afdeling1.klant.nl , and
www.kunde.de , all registered with different ISPs, to point to the
same site.  It is quicker and easier for them to use an IP address and
just ask their other ISPs to change the DNS instead of having to ask
us to change our web server configuration every time they add a new
domain.

I agree that these are special cases and we do not expect very many of
them, but we would still like to have the flexibility to offer them
this if they need it (and pay extra for it).

(Note: This is quite separate from our present web service, where the
software is out of date and only supports IP-based hosting; we are
planning to withdraw this and replace it with name-based hosting for
most of our customers once the existing contracts with the customers
end.)

Gyan Mathur
Senior Systeembeheerder, Demon Internet Nederland