IP assignment for virtual webhosting

At Thu, 11 May 2000, owner-lir-wg at ripe.net wrote:

>there is one big problem i see: If you charge your customers for traffic,
>you must count the traffic, and the easiest and most reliable way to do
>this is on the firewall/router. Thats the way we do and therefore we need
>one IP per customer. Most customers have more than one site and for that we
>are using HTTP 1.1 (NameVirtualHosts).
>As long as there is no Package for apache to count the traffic !reliable!
>(the traffic counted via access logs is << real traffic ) I do not see a
>way to put all customers to a couple of IPs.

Same over here. We have built our own database-driven system over the last
years which links IP adresses to customers, measures their traffic and
even has the ability to traffic-shape groups of IP adresses to a certain
bandwith, like a Packeteer box can do. 

Input comes from the border router which has IP accounting. Ofcourse when
customers want more than one hostname linked to the same virthost (but
with different content) we use a name-based virthost.

Because of this system it is very hard to implement name-based virtual
hosting, all accounting is done on one IP adress then and we have to
rethink our accounting scheme of virthosts (which takes time, costs money
etc. etc.)

Mark Lastdrager
Pine Internet

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