IP assignment for virtual webhosting

Hi Nurani,

> OUR SUGGESTION
> 
> The RIPE NCC has followed the deployment of HTTP 1.1 closely over the past
> year. According to recent surveys, a vast majority of clients now support
> HTTP 1.1 (namebased HTTP requests). It is our belief that the majority of
> webserver applications support namebased webhosting as well.
> 
> 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 believe it's a very good idea to strongly promote using namebased webhosting.
We've done surveys on our own website, and found out the amount of clients
connecting with 1.0 is next to nothing. So the 'old clients' excuse just
isnt there. And in cases where we've had complaints, customers were more
than willing to upgrade their browsers after we explain whats going on. 
We've had to do this like twice this year, no big deal.

I dont think though that prohibiting ip based virtual hosting is a good idea.
There will always be reasons to use ip based hosting. You've heard some
already. But people should just have a damn good reason. 

Reclaiming already assigned virtual webhosting space is a little over the top.
Especially in cases where it might only be 1 or 2 /24s. Ofcourse, if some
ISP is using 2 /16's for virtual hosting, then it might be another matter. 
If reclaiming is done, I would suggest taking a very long grace period.

Regards,

Cor Bosman