guideline for name-based web hosting justification

[Randy Katz]

I am a major shareholder in a $7MM/year plus web hosting company, which I 
consider small, every word Matt says makes 100% sense. It seems there is 
this "wave" of biased opinions about web hosting stemming from the ISP vs. 
web host days and easy and relatively low cost to entry for  the average 
web hosting business, but this is simply not an intellectual approach 
towards the problem and shows that while they might understand by now what 
an ISP does and the importance of it they are openly taking jabs at web 
hosting which show complete iqnorance in that area.

Please answer the points.

Thank you,
Randy Katz

At 08:50 PM 9/11/2000 -0400, Matt Bailey wrote:
>Your missing the point completely.
>I can create a Netflow based usuage in 30 seconds to parse one customers
>40Gigabytes worth of logs would take days let alone the machine dedicated to
>processing it.. Your telling me I should save the traffic log for all the
>sites would could be 100ish gigs per month and parse them? Why? I can use
>Netflow based accounting on an IP address and cough up an answer in real
>time anytime I want it.
>
>Obviously you don;t have much web hosting.. I would like to hear comments
>from some of the web hosting big boys (concentric, etc..) on what they view
>of this.. What gets tricky is when you have one site scattered over several
>machines because part of it uses a database/Part of it needs SSL etc.. This
>just can not happen yet.
>
>SSL requires and IP.. So I put a customer into the system. Your telling me I
>have to rip them out and re-add them to my systems because now they need an
>IP.. That is total BS.
>
>Log files are archaic forms of gathering data. Most of us gather data in
>Real Time rather than parsing logs. My Customers can get a second by second
>count of how their website is doing.
>
>Ohhh yes and that one website owner who is a total asshole to AOL and you
>get your 30,000 site IIS box blackholed. Is that fair to the 29,999 other
>customers? Have you ever tried to get out of an AOL blacklist? I have over
>40 IP's I can not use for anything other than office machines as they are
>blackholed and the customers are LONG GONE..
>
>Of course since we issue an FTP site based on their virtual websites IP we
>get away with using 30,000 IP's since there is no header in FTP...
>And of course the virtual mail server on the other box which requires an IP
>Nope no headers yet there either.. Guess what I burn two for every customer,
>and guess what ARIN can not stop it cause technically I use FTP and MAIL
>which can not yet run under one IP. IP Based websites are nothing more than
>a HACK in the protocol. If the WWC was smart for 1.2 or 2.0 whatever they
>are working on they would pull virtual headers back out since 60% or so of
>the people still send http/1.0 requests. I could not tell 30,000 web clients
>that if someone wants to visit their site they have to upgrade from netscape
>2.0 (yes we still have customers using win 3.1 and netscape 2.0 with the
>netscape dialer.. I cringe but they are the customer they are always
>right..)
>
>I think ARIN needs to rethink what they are suggesting those of us that can
>not change the way we host websites will work the loopholes. Which I don't
>agree with. ARIN should have asked the community what we can do to help
>limit the waste. Rather than forcing it upon us. I would guess if they Asked
>MIT or GE or some of the other companies out there to give back unused space
>that they would.. I try very hard to convince my dedicated customers to use
>NAT and overload IP's as much as they can. If they have an absolute need
>then we assign them space. This is only fair.
>
>OK lets check this out.. We have 200 dedicated dial-ups we can use 200 IP's
>for this. We have 200 dedicated web sites we can only use 1?
>Why does that work.. OK Now lets say ARIN says they will not assign you more
>than 1 IP per piece of modem gear because you can use NAT.. Don't bitch if
>you support this on Virtual Webhosting as these are the equiv. infact more
>will work via NAT than with Virtual web.. Someone at ARIN please please tell
>me why that wasn't added to the policy? This would free up 75% of the IP's
>on the internet if you require NAT...
>
>OK I am getting a headache.. Some people just don;t understand why this is a
>bad idea.