ARIN Web Hosting Policy

[Tony]

I would like to add my two cents to the IP policy debate, but I would like
to add it as a Business Person who makes a living on the Internet (yes, I
admit it, I am a "suit")  :)

Mostly you guys have talked about Technical Issues that I know very little
about. I trust that you are the best in your fields, however, there is a
side of this issue that has yet to be addressed.

My case below is made with some assumptions that cannot be verified by
me....One of you guys might be able to get an official statement from the
parties involved, but thus far I, nor anyone that I know, has been able to
get a straight answer.  We arrived at this information by running tests that
sometimes take months and months to draw a conclusion because of the shear
amount of time that it takes to get listed on most Search Engines.

As a business trying to be succesful on the Internet one must be succesful
with the Search Engines.  For those of you that do not know this, most
Search Engines (Exite, Alta Vista, et al) that use algorithms to score a
presence in a related search also intentionally BLOCK more than one domain
per IP address.  This policy started because of people spamming the Search
Engines with multiple submissions by the same site, using Third Level
Domains that all resolved to the same IP address, and free host accounts
that Search Engine Spammers use to like to hide behind. To counter that, the
engines (Inktomi, et al) instituted a system that says that only ONE site
will be listed per IP address, so if I owned a Sporting Goods Store and had
a #1 listing for "Baseball Gloves" and someone else on the same server (with
same IP address) submits their Pokemon Hobby Site either their site will
bump mine out, or theirs will get passed over without a listing.  In many
cases there may tens, hundreds, or possibly even thousands of domains on a
single high end web server and only ONE of them will be listed on any
particular Engine at a particular time.

Once again, this is my understanding and NOT something that I have confirmed
with any major Search Engine (not that I havent tried, but they are less
than forthcoming with information about their algorithms...and with good
cause I might add).  We have run test after test and it keeps bringing up
the same result, even though nobody will admit it on the record.  Yahoo
still does site submissions manually so I think they are exempt from this,
as they list SITES not domains....but it can take up to 10 months to get a
listing on Yahoo and only a few weeks on the automated ones.

If this concern could be completely addressed then from the BUSINESS angle,
I don't think we would have any problems with this measure.....all we care
about is being able to make sales which keeps ALL of our jobs protected...we
will always let the experts (you guys) figure out all of the stuff with
acronyms.  :)

Thats just my $ .02

Tony