IP assignment for virtual webhosting

Hi,

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

We think this is the right way to do it (btw, we are currently engaged
in switching to name-based hosting, and if this is to become the official
way I strongly advise a long transition period for existing servers).

But an official RIPE-policy should mention the exceptions, like SSL (as
long as there is no common way to do this on a named basis -- at least
apache can not do it (at least, not yet)).

It should be obvious that only virtual _web_-hosting is what the policy
is for, and that anon ftp, real audio etc. are not what is handled by
this (better to state this explicitly so noone gets a wrong impression).

Of course, all these other hosting activities are in the same basket of
"virtual ip based hosting only as long as name-based hosting is not
technically widespread".

As long as other protocols are provided on a host which is also
providing the virtual web host for a domain there is no reason
for not using ip-based virtual webhosting because the addresses are used
up by these other protocols anyway.  But the reason for IP-based hosting
in these cases is clearly in the other protocols, so this should not be
an issue.


The "political", i.e. customer-based reasons for IPbwh are harder
to handle.  With a RIPE policy in place some of the reasons 
will no longer be an issue because we all can point at the policy
("this is how it is done, and everyone has to do it this way, so there").
I would count 'Missing DNS reverse lookup' to these.

Of the remaining reasons I think we need a list to battle on
so that in the end we all have the same opinions about what is a
reason and what is not.  If we reach consensus that there is no reason
at all: even better.

Regards,
	Juergen Kammer
--
Juergen Kammer	                                          Hostmaster SaarNet
InfoServe GmbH / eurodata GmbH & Co. KG                 Tel. +49 681 8808761
Grossblitterdorfer Str. 257-259                         Fax: +49 681 8808300
D-66119 Saarbruecken             Email: kammer at infoS.de,j.kammer at eurodata.de