IP assignment for virtual webhosting

On Mon, 08 May 2000 18:26:19 +0200, Nurani Nimpuno wrote:

>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).



There is one issue I'd like to bring up that we constantly run into 
and was never brought up in this debate, which somehow amazes me.

Our typical situation is that when a customer orders a domain named 
web site it comes along with an FTP server and a POP-3 server so they 
can have their own email addresses.

While we could host all customer pages on the same host with the same 
IP using HTTP 1.1, in order to do the same with the POP servers we 
need to distinguish the POP server by its single IP address, since 
there is no HTTP 1.1 equivalent for POP. So we end up with 99% of our 
domains having a different IP address each, in which case who _cares_ 
if we also use that IP address for the web server? 

Are we really wasting IP address space?

Hasn't anybody run into this situation? If so, how are you dealing 
with it?

We would ask that, unless a viable solution to this problem is found, 
name based hosting should be encouraged but not required.

BTW we are adopting HTTP 1.1 name based virtual hosts anyway in case 
the FTP and POP issues could be solved.

Regards

Javier Llopis			BitMailer, S.L.
javier at bitmailer.com		Juan Bravo 51, Dup. 1-Izq
Tel: +34 91 402 1551		28006 Madrid
Fax: +34 91 402 4115		SPAIN