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

[Richard Jimmerson]

Hello Simon,

Thank you for sending your message to the vwp list.

The name-based web hosting policy you are referring to below
was suspended on October 3, 2000.  This was a result of feedback
received from the community on mailing lists and at the ARIN VI
public policy meeting.  You can find more information about this 
under the announcements section of ARIN's front page (www.arin.net).

This mailing list (vwp at arin.net) was established to facilitate
the discussions of the virtual web hosting policy committee.
The charter/goal of this committee can be found in the archives
of this mailing list, available at 

   http://www.arin.net/mailinglists/vwp/index.html

Please take an active role in the discussions taking place on
this mailing list.  These discussions will have a direct impact
on the future of this currently suspended policy.

Best Regards,

Richard Jimmerson
American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-vwp at arin.net [mailto:owner-vwp at arin.net]On Behalf Of Simon
> Sent: Tuesday, November 07, 2000 12:27 PM
> To: vwp at arin.net
> Subject: We want ARIN (or anyone else) to tell us how to deal 
> with this
> problem...
> 
> 
> 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
> 
> 
>