Hello
Could anyone please explain what I give-up for IP-less
hosting.
I know that to have a SSL cert. I need an IP.


Thank you in advance

izino,

In the event someone visits your site by IP address it won't show up if you have virtual hosting. Other than that there is no benefit to running either way with purely web hosting these days.

Sincerely,

-Matt

I was told that the search engines won't pick up your site?

izino,

Haven't experienced that problem. We offer some basic submission services for our virtual-hosting clients and they've never had a problem.

This was problably due to a previous incompatibility with web spiders and HTTP1.1. As far as I can tell it's been resolved and no issues raised since then.

Sincerely,

-Matt

The search engine issue was an issue in the past but now that most engines and spiders are equipped to handle HTTP/1.1 there is no issue.

Some very old browsers probably from the early Windows 3.1 days might not support HTTP/1.1 and thus might not be able to view your site if it is using shared browser. I believe there might be people still using those legacy systems but probably very rare in today's context.

Here are some of the FAQs from APNIC :-
http://www.apnic.net/info/faq/virtualwebfaq.html#3

Under what circumstances is name-based web hosting possible?

Name-based web hosting is generally possible for web sites that do not have any special security requirements. For example, name-based hosting would be appropriate for personal web sites or servers that need to be accessible via more than one domain name.

Under what circumstances is name-based web hosting not possible?

There are a few technical limitations to name-based hosting. The most common one is some websites requirements of using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) for e-commerce services, particularly if a separate certificate is used for each virtual domain, and for anonymous login functionality with virtual FTP services.


Can browsers that are only HTTP/1.0 compliant view websites that are hosted by a name-based virtual hosting system?

Browsers that are HTTP/1.0 compliant can view websites that are hosted by name if their version of the browser issues requests with an additional Host: header field. (This is a required header in HTTP/1.1, but all current HTTP/1.0 browsers also issue this header)

The justification of browsers not being HTTP1.0 compliant is not sufficient to warrant large scale IP-based hosting. Statistics collected by APNIC over a four month period show that almost all browsers visiting www.apnic.net provide the Host: header field (98.9% of HTTP1.0 and 99.8% HTTP1.1).

Originally posted by eddy2099
The search engine issue was an issue in the past but now that most engines and spiders are equipped to handle HTTP/1.1 there is no issue. Right. I'd even go so far as to say that all search engines will be able to handle name-based virtual hosting. Really even when there was a concern it wasn't that they wouldn't list you or would degrade your rankings, it was that a given IP address may be penalized for spamming a search engine even if only one site owner who was using it actually had done so. But no major search engine has taken that kind of action based on IP address in a couple of years. It really isn't a concern today.

By the way, just for clarity: you'll have an IP address either way, you can't be "IP-less." At question is whether you have a unique address, or whether you share your same IP address with other sites.

I run a name based site that ranks very highly in a range of fairly popular keywords. Search engines have no problems with these sites at all.

There are a few good reasons to have a unique IP:

You can host photos, avatars, banners, and other files on the site and link to them (via IP#) in forums, on eBay, and on other websites without revealing the domain name. (extremely important in a number of scenarios - if you can't think of one, you're just not trying ;))
You can still reach the site even when the DNS is down. (anyone recall what happened last weekend?) This is extremely important if you've written client software that 'phones home' in realtime for various reasons - license verification, statistics collection, etc.
A ping goes to your actual account and not just the IP of the host machine. That can be a valuable diagnostic tool in a lot of situations.
Linking by IP is faster than waiting for DNS to resolve - time-sensitive data (gaming, stock quotes, etc) work better

Have a look at: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=92709
;)