guideline for name-based web hosting justification

[Mike Horwath]

On Mon, Sep 11, 2000 at 08:27:16PM -0400, Ron Hensley wrote:
> Couldn't this be implemented on the WWW server however? With NT's IIS for
> example, or Apache
> under any platform you can of course have 1000 WWW domain sites all sharing
> one IP Address
> bound to the NIC Card. While some monitoring software my only look at the ip
> addresses and thus cant differentiate,
> the WWW server itself sorts the connections based, not on the IP Address,
> but rather on the content in the packets.
> More to the point, on the URL being requested.
> 
> Based on that, each WWW site generates its own unique log files for that
> site.
> Thus software can be written to total the byte counts of the hits to that
> WWW site. WebTrends comes
> to mind though it doesn't produce billing data of course.
> 
> Also any machine sitting on the network, like a firewall, that's gathering
> statistics on bandwidth by IP Address
> could just as easily inspect the data payload and generate statistics based
> on that content of the given WWW site.
> Yes I realize that would be processor intensive, however firewalls do that
> now to look for attack signatures and the like.
> 
> To make it short, it sounds like your asking to use 30,000 ip addresses for
> 30,000 WWW sites, when you only
> need one, because your software vendor has written bad billing software that
> doesn't support virtual WWW hosts
> sharing the same ip address.

Oh my god, this has gotta be one of the worst things you could ask
someone to do.

Go and buy all this gear (many thousands of dollars) just so you can
do the billing you have been doing that costs pennies per year to do.
It would be cheaper to put each web site on its own server (or hell,
put each on its own interface card) than to purchase the kinds of
hardware needed to do what we already do with current hardware and
software.

With PC hardare going for a couple hundred bux, I could put each web
site on its own server.  Sure, I would run out of equipment room space
someday, but that day isn't for some time.

The days of running out of IP addresses is basically over.

Yes, there is still a crunch, but with IPv6 around the corner (haha),
this issue will be moot in the foreseeable future.

This is an absolutely silly rule that penalizes ANYONE that bills for
actual bandwidth used and not for number of bytes transferred.

-- 
Mike Horwath           IRC: Drechsau         drechsau at Geeks.ORG
Home: 763-540-6815  1901 Sumter Ave N, Golden Valley, MN  55427
Opinions stated in this message, or any message posted by myself
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