Search Engines/IP restrictions/policy changes

[Mark]

Ted hit the issue right on the head, although, as he pointed out himself,
there are issues beyond those he mentioned.

SSL, FrontPage, FTP, and search engines will all have problems with
name-based hosts.  These, however, are probably the easier of the problems
to address.

What resolution is there for the hosting providers to use other network
devices for proxying, load balancing, rate-shaping, and other QoS issues?
These are large scale and extremely significant issues that may
significantly undermine a web hosts ability to effectively conduct
business.  Not to mention, these devices become much harder, more time
consuming, and quite possibly more costly to update than other services
such as FrontPage and FTP.

Closer to the heart of the problem may be web hosts' limited
representation at ARIN policy meetings.  This policy, no matter how good
or bad it may be, did not come from ARIN the organization, it came from
the voting members of ARIN.  If web hosts want to see a reversal or
revision of this policy, then they must represent themselves in ARINs
coming policy meeting this October.


--------------------------------------------------- 
Mark Rekai - INetU, Inc.(tm) - http://www.INetU.net 
Electronic commerce - Web development - Web hosting 
       Mark at INetU.net - Phone: (610) 266-7441


On Wed, 6 Sep 2000, Ted Pavlic wrote:

> > Most ISP's at this point use dynamically assigned IP addressing... each IP
> > address (just like a modem port) being used by the maximum the ISP can get
> > away with ( 10 customers per modem port is a workable standard)
> 
> There's no reason why ISPs have to use real IP addresses to allocate to
> their users. A large cable provider could be providing addresses in the
> 10./8 network to their customers and do NAT. Changes like that are **MUCH**
> less radical than the changes recently made by ARIN and would have far less
> consequences.
> 
> ARIN is taking away IP addresses from those who need them most -- THE
> INTERNET. They are taking them away from the Internet and giving them to the
> people who are using the Internet. As a consequence, it's becoming much more
> difficult for the Internet to provide services for those using it.
> 
> > As for the policy on IP addresses and Virtual Web hosting ... it did not
> > come out of the blue.
> > Most people I know saw it coming for about a year. It just went from
> > "strongly advised against" to "against policy".
> 
> The Internet is NOT YET READY for that change, however. ARIN itself on:
> 
> http://www.arin.net/announcements/name_based_hosting.html
> 
> Cited Internet **DRAFTS** as reference material. Right on those drafts it
> says in plain view:
> 
>    Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
>    and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
>    time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference mate-
>    rial or to cite them other than as ``work in progress.''
> 
> That it is inappropriate to do such a thing.
> 
> Secure communications is very big right now. SSL is an important thing and
> is widely used by many hosts. The nature of SSL does not allow for
> name-based SSL web hosting. TLS is hardly a solution to all of this. Using
> HTTP/1.1 over TLS is hardly supported by any webservers and hardly supported
> by any clients.
> 
> FrontPage Server Extensions are big right now. Some web providers depend on
> them in order to give their clients access to their websites. Without some
> major modifications to how FrontPage works, FPSE are COMPLETELY INCOMPATIBLE
> with HTTP/1.1.
> 
> FTP virtual hosting cannot be done name-based.
> 
> Myself and other web hosting providers I have spoken to all feel that ARIN
> just did not consider the needs of the providers which host most of the
> sites on the Internet. One website companies are fine and small <256 host
> webhosting providers are fine, but anyone who breaks that 256 mark has a LOT
> of work to support name-based webhosting.
> 
> If this policy change causes a loss of business to ISPs who host thousands
> of websites, those thousands of websites will be redistributed across the
> Internet to smaller web hosting providers who still use IP-based webhosting.
> Instead of one thousand sites going through one IP at a larger webhosting
> provider, there will be one thousand sites going through one thousand IPs
> all over the Internet.
> 
> That's what makes no sense about this policy change -- it just causes
> problems and does not effectively SOLVE many (if ANY) problems. It just
> allows for big ISPs to give more IPs to their residential customers WHO DO
> NOT NEED THEM.
> 
> > I do agree that it would have been nice if ARIN had worked with the Search
> > Engine folks (Yahoo/Google/Lycos/Hotbot/Etc) to be ready for this change
> in
> > policy.
> 
> Personally, I don't see what the big deal about the search engines is. The
> search engines have an easy change to make -- they need to upgrade their web
> spiders to use HTTP/1.1 instead of HTTP/1.0. That's easy -- maybe another
> line of code to spit out a "Host:" line. I hardly think the search engine
> issue is any big deal.
> 
> I don't think that ARIN should be held accountable for the search engines;
> HOWEVER, I do think that ARIN should be held accountable for the tremendous
> amount of trouble that name-based webhosting does to the rest of the world.
> The Internet still **NEEDS** IP-based webhosting for all of the reasons I
> mentioned above and I'm sure many more.
> 
> It really makes me wonder who's running the show...
> 
> All the best --
> Ted
>