IP assignment for virtual webhosting

Dear lir-wg,

At the end of 1999 we raised the issue of IP Assignment to virtual 
web-hosting
and we believe that it now is high time to conclude this discussion. 
We received very useful feedback from the community and we also 
brought the
discussion further to the other RIRs, ARIN and APNIC. This has now 
also been
discussed in their respective regions.

In the RIPE community there was tremendously strong endorsement for 
name-based
web-hosting although there were also several arguments against a 
policy making it mandatory to use name-based web-hosting. There were 
technical arguments put forward, naming examples where IP-based 
web-hosting is necessary in order to allow certain technologies or 
applications such as SSL for example, but there were also voices 
raised against the hassle of upgrading old hard- and software.

The RIPE NCC is in favour of a policy making it mandatory to use 
name-based
web-hosting when technically feasible. However, due to some of the 
voices
raised against this, we believe an accurate conclusion at this moment 
would be
to not change any policy at this point, but to further strongly 
discourage
IP-based web-hosting.

We do however wish to raise our concern regarding what we see as an 
inefficient usage of addresses in our limited address pool. We would 
therefore like to request the community to consider making it 
mandatory for NEW installations to use domain based web-hosting, with 
the exception of a set of agreed applications needing IP based 
web-hosting (eg. SSL).

We wish to add this to the agenda at the upcoming RIPE meeting for 
further
discussion and welcome any input the community may have on this 
matter.


Kind regards,

Nurani Nimpuno
Registration Services Manager
RIPE NCC