IP assignment for virtual webhosting

On 1999-11-17T10:51:14,
   Nurani Nimpuno <nurani at ripe.net> said:

> 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.
> 
> Please provide us with any feedback or comments you might have.

We would look forward to a very strong recommendation from RIPE with regard to
this issue, promoting name based virtual servers.

Apache can handle this perfectly (migration is quite easy too), the problem
with virtual ftp servers can be "solved" with a special directory tree,
encoding a username/password into the URL or something alike.

All browsers I know of (even lynx, w3m) support this feature by now.

Acceptance on the customer side is somehow suddenly vastly increased if we can
point the customer at an official RIPE document/RFC, at least in our
experience.

Some "peer pressure" on browser/server developers sure would help to solve the
last remaining problems with non-working SSL virtual hosting etc. 

Said strong recommendation may include reclaiming "wasted" address space as
far as we are concerned. (But we do perfectly well with just a /27 for virtual
hosting, hosting a few 100s of servers on a single IP, and haven't received a
complain about this in the last 2 years. I can see how some LIRs may not look
forward to renumbering a /21 full of virtual servers...)

Sincerely,
    Lars Marowsky-Brie
	
--
Lars Marowsky-Brie
Network Management

teuto.net Netzdienste GmbH