We want ARIN (or anyone else) to tell us how to deal with this problem...

[Simon]

Hello Everyone:

We are a small web-hosting company that has hit a name-based problem this morning and 
almost lost 60 clients.

We knew the problems will begin. We just didn't know in what order. Here is the situation... 
recently, our uplink provider refused to assign us more IPs due to ARIN's name-based hosting 
policy (now suspended). Hence, we were forced to use a single IP to host 100-250 (in our case) 
websites. 

This morning, a popular site that receives over a million unique visitors a day has placed a 
JavaScript script on their main page that had a dramatic performance impact on one of our 
servers, hosting 100+ sites using the same IP. What this JS did is instructed visitor's browser of 
this popular site to load few pages from one of the sites on our server. This server went from 
250 to 1000 (set limit) apache process in matter of seconds. From 0.8Mbits to 12Mbits of 
throughoutput. And there was nothing we could do on our end, but to disable DNS for this site 
and wait until the change propagates. The only quick way to stop this is to remove an IP in 
question from a server or drop packets for this IP at the router. But, how can this be done when 
100+ other sites share the same IP? How do we explain this to our clients? We got lucky this 
time, as the offending website's owner has agreed to remove the JS from their site. If they didn't, 
we would've probably lost more than 1/2 of our clients on this single server. By the way, the 
offending site has done this to a client on our server that been stealing links from them for past 
two weeks. Since they could not stop them, they decided to do this. I wish they would've 
contacted us to give us a chance to stop the link stealing, but they did not.

Does this justify us to assign a unique IP to each of our web-hosting clients?

Sincerely,
Simon
Accelerated Web