Recently I have seen threads, about the pros and cons of Name based VS IP based web sites. I just received an e-mail newsletter from netmechanic.com which mentioned an online article of theirs. It adds some additional reasons why one should get a Dedicated IP address for their web site. The URL is:

http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol5/promo_no6.htm

As a newbie, I selected a Windows Server for my first web hosting ISP, because I use MS FrontPage. They had name based web sites. Due to some "glitch", I was never able to "Publish" my web site to their server. Now, it's on a Linux Server at OLM and I have no trouble "Publishing" with MS FrontPage. For several reasons, a Dedicated IP address is now one of my firm requirements.

shouldnt matter on the frontpage issue
anonymous ftp, and ssl are other reasons to get a dedicated ip

Deb: If you read that online article, on the NetMechanic web site, they mention Search Engines / Directories that require a Dedicated IP address to include the web site. Also, what can happen to you, if someone else using the same IP address on a Server using "Name Based" hosting gets blacklisted, for e-mail spamming, etc. I knew about SSL & FTP before, to say nothing of the ability to get to my site if DNS goes down, but this was news to me. I won't ever use Name Based Hosting again, although I agree with the idea of conserving IP addresses. Cordially, Lanny in Colombia, South America

It's not that hosts don't want to give out dedicated IP addresses. ARIN strongly recommends IP address conservation, and many upsream providers it. Whoever created IPv4 didn't think more than 5 minutes ahead, so we have a problem now. The Internet protocol is experiencing growing pains. Switching to IPv6 will require all internet software to be updated. I just don't see that happening any time soon. If you agree with conserving IP addresses, then what other ways can providers use to conserve IP addresses?

Hello all-

I would like to make a few comments about name-based hosting, as a web host that was pushed kicking and screaming in that direction.:stickout

In the past, we always gave every account its own IP. I am on record here at WHT as being very "pro dedicated IP". The same is true on other message boards.

Then, ARIN started becoming a complete pain when it came to obtaining IPs. We had to consider the alternative---name-based hosting.

I was being forced to do something that I did not want to do. I stayed up for 32 hours straight researching this and experimenting on a server---agonizing over this decision. Here are my findings:

1) It is not true that you need a dedicated IP to publish with FrontPage before dns propagation. All you have to do is publish to http://ip.num.ber/~user/ using your username and password. "ip.num.ber", of course, is the shared IP number. It seems to be important to add the trailing slash (at least on my servers). This is common practice for us now. My FP fears were relieved.

2) It is not true that you need a dedicated IP to use anonymous ftp. If you use the full e-mail address anonymous@theirdomain.com, clients can use anonymous FTP with their account. {EDIT: This works only sometimes. See my reply below. Scratch this remark.}

3) Search engines do not overlook websites which are name-based. This is shown in most searces you perform. Think of all the geocities, tripod, angelfire, etc. sites which get pulled up in most searches. These sites are name-based.

4) Banning of IPs by search engines: The question is, "If one site on a shared IP is banned by a search engine, will all the other sites be banned, by association with the same IP?" I have researched and talked to people regarding name-based hosting and the banning of sites from search engines. The search engine in doubt was AltaVista. There were rumors that AltaVista would ban everyone on the IP. The majority of "experts" thought the answer would be, "No, the other sites would not be banned," but there were always some that were not so sure. To find out for sure, I wrote AltaVista and received a reply.

My letter:

I am owner of Perfecthost.net, a webhosting company. This is a question
about the banning of IP numbers by AltaVista.

In the past, we have assigned unique IP numbers to each of our hosting
accounts. Because of a stricter stand on assigning IP numbers by ARIN,
we are forced to go the way of most webhosts and use a shared IP.

Some of our clients have expressed concern about sharing an IP. They want to know if one site is banned by AltaVista, will all sites which share the IP be banned also?

I appreciate your advice in this matter.

Thank you,
Lamar Stanfield
lamar@perfecthost.net
www.perfecthost.net



AltaVista's Reply (short and to the point):)

Thanks for your question.
If one site is banned by AltaVista, the qualified sites which share the IP will not be banned.

Regards,
AltaVista Spam Support


Notice the word not!

Some have asked, "What if they were lying?" My answer is, "This is all we have to go on. It makes no difference if they were lying or not, we can't change the situation."

5) A dedicated IP is required to have your own ssl cert. There is no way around this at this time. We offer IPs to accounts that want their own cert, but 99.5% of all clients would rather use the cert we provide for everyone on the server.

Again, I was pushed into it against my will, but feel very good about it now. I hope this helps some.

-Lamar

Originally posted by Perfecthost
2) It is not true that you need a dedicated IP to use anonymous ftp. If you use the full e-mail address anonymous@theirdomain.com, clients can use anonymous FTP with their account. My fears were put to rest here.

That is not true anonymous FTP. You wouldn't be able to view ftp://ftp.theirdomain.com/ in a web browser that way. That's the reason people say anonymous FTP requires a dedicated IP address.

First: question
Do I need a dedicated IP to use zoneedit's services; In addition to just pointing domains, I also like to user wildcard (which isn't registered with my host)

Here are things that we don't need IP's for
- Search engines
- Anon FTP, as far as Im concerned, most people don't need this service, but if they do, then maybe they should get an IP, but the rest of us don't.
- IP based attacks would only hit the server once, not as many times as there are IP's
- Internet Service Providers could assign users a private IP address and a hostname (even a permanent hostnanem, such as user.isp.net), this would eliminate need for IP address for unique computer id for home users
- As far as I'm concerned, the average user does not need SSL, there are those that need it for only a few things, shared SSL, and the remaining get an IP.


Name something that you need IP for, and the average user probably does not really need it. Furthermore, if steps are taking to give users "alternatives, then we will need IP a lot less.

Sadly, I have a dedicated IP address. That is my hosts bidding, and at this point, I really don't care, altthough I used to think it a necessity, I have learned what "hostname" means. :)

No, you don't need a dedicated IP address to use ZoneEdit, but wildcards will have to be setup on your host's end, unless you're going to be doing redirection through ZoneEdit.

Originally posted by Lanny
Recently I have seen threads, about the pros and cons of Name based VS IP based web sites. I just received an e-mail newsletter from netmechanic.com which mentioned an online article of theirs. It adds some additional reasons why one should get a Dedicated IP address for their web site. The URL is:

http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol5/promo_no6.htm

As a newbie, I selected a Windows Server for my first web hosting ISP, because I use MS FrontPage. They had name based web sites. Due to some "glitch", I was never able to "Publish" my web site to their server. Now, it's on a Linux Server at OLM and I have no trouble "Publishing" with MS FrontPage. For several reasons, a Dedicated IP address is now one of my firm requirements.

I must have missed the additional reasons in that article. I didn't see any.

Name based hosting works fine with FrontPage.

I have no idea what lamar is trying to say about anonymous FTP. :)

Originally posted by bitserve
I have no idea what lamar is trying to say about anonymous FTP. :)

LOL! I stand corrected. It seems that it works only for the first account added to a shared IP---(the account I was experimenting with)...and that only 2 out of 10 times today. Today, I was told that it is luck that it happens at all.

-Lamar

AltaVista's Reply (short and to the point)

It was too short for a proper explanation.

However, the reason people say they do ban by IP, is because they did used to do it that way.

Once ARIN came out with the new IP policy, a ton of hosts contacted search engines, and the search engines all jumped in line to ban by name now.

This happend well over a year ago.. possibly close to two.

It is a shame that places that send info out in a newsletter, don't at least update their 2 year old articles before sending hords of newbies to the page to read old news.
( I got a copy of the same one today)
went to the page, and couldn't believe they left as much out of date as they did.

This is not normal for netmechanic... They usually give new information.

Tim L

Originally posted by superiorhost
However, the reason people say they do ban by IP, is because they did used to do it that way. I just want to second that. The concensus body of knowledge right now is that no search engine is taking that kind of action based on an IP number. There are still some people who are a little paranoid about it so don't like to use shared IPs, in large part because you still do hear that it is the case -- but attribute it now to rumor.

The one thing I wouldn't do, from a search engine presence standpoint, is crosslink two or more unrelated sites, for link pop purposes, from a single IP. But for a single site playing by the rules it isn't a problem.

Originally posted by ToastyX
Switching to IPv6 will require all internet software to be updated. I just don't see that happening any time soon. If you agree with conserving IP addresses, then what other ways can providers use to conserve IP addresses?

IPv6 has a 20 year transition phase to it.....Some of us in the industry (not me :D ) will be retired before it's fully implemented.

With regards to conserving IP addresses:

I can only think of 3 ways off the top of my head
1) Name Based Hosting
2) Do what VO does and use IPs for nameservers and DNS servers
3) For those with broadband connections and have home networks, use an "IP Sharer" aka router. I've got 5 computers hooked up to my cable connection and use only 1 IP (of course each of my computers has got a private IP also, but that doesn't conflict with the outside world)

Originally posted by superiorhost


It is a shame that places that send info out in a newsletter, don't at least update their 2 year old articles before sending hords of newbies to the page to read old news.
Tim L

I guess the statements on Altavista's site is also out of date:
http://help.altavista.com/adv_search/ast_haw_spam

"If being found via search engines is important to your business, be very careful about where you have your pages hosted. If the hosting service also hosts spammers and pornographers, you could wind up being penalized or excluded simply because the underlying IP address for that service is the same for all the virtual domains it includes."

Also, most blackhole lists ban by IP.

To simply ban by domain name would not be very effective since spammers more than anyone have sometimes hundreds of domains registered, and its too easy to create sub domains.

If someone is attacking my server I'm blocking the IP, not the host.

Steve, you must remember that most servers you will be on send email out the primary IP, just because your website has a dedicated ip does not mean that your email traffic goes out over that IP.

Originally posted by Steve33
I guess the statements on Altavista's site is also out of date:
http://help.altavista.com/adv_search/ast_haw_spam

"If being found via search engines is important to your business, be very careful about where you have your pages hosted. If the hosting service also hosts spammers and pornographers, you could wind up being penalized or excluded simply because the underlying IP address for that service is the same for all the virtual domains it includes."

This is refering to hosts which allow spam and are not active in stomping it out. Notice it says, "If the hosting service also hosts spammers and pornographers."

-Lamar

Originally posted by superiorhost

Once ARIN came out with the new IP policy, a ton of hosts contacted search engines, and the search engines all jumped in line to ban by name now.


I am surprised that no one has mentioned that based on feedback from the Internet community, and Web hosting companies in particular, the ARIN policy was promptly modified to state a recommendation and to request information as to the reasons a company chooses to use per-IP virtual hosting. Yet the "because of ARIN" line of reasoning promptly entered Internet lore, and still appears in some providers' FAQs.

An important point about the IPv4 "shortage" is that we aren't running out of IP addresses because of Web hosting. Web hosts can manage 99.9% utilization of their netblocks, assuming they have an efficient LAN topology. ISPs and NSPs who do downstream allocations are limited by how efficient they encourage their customers to be. Corporate networks, especially legacy allocations, waste huge expanses of IP space, although some of this has been reclaimed. For example, many Class A's are allocated in entirety to various organizations. Xerox has 13.x.x.x. IBM has 9.x.x.x. The military has at least three of these. Each one of those is 16,777,216 IP addresses.

Another point in Web hosts' favor is that they make relatively few BGP route announcements. ISPs and NSPs, on the other hand, are commonly re-announcing smaller downstream allocations without properly aggregating them. Look at the weekly CIDR summary on NANOG to see just how badly some major backbones are doing in this area. The result is that BGP speaking routers need more RAM, more CPU, and are less stable as a result of having more BGP routes, more announcements, more withdrawals, etc.

Citing one example I'm personally familiar with, 192,000 IP addresses are announced in only four routes, with absolute stability and high-density utilization.

But I've already rambled on too long.

Kevin

Originally posted by Perfecthost


This is refering to hosts which allow spam and are not active in stomping it out.

-Lamar

Where in the world did you come up with that statement? I didnt read that anywhere.

Thats beside the point, the point was if search engines ban by IP or domain.

Xerox has 13.x.x.x. IBM has 9.x.x.x

Now there's something I didn't know....

I can't wait till they implement IPv6, it'll be pretty neat to have every connect device have its own IP address - then you'll really be able to control your oven from work :D

Originally posted by akashd

Now there's something I didn't know....

I can't wait till they implement IPv6, it'll be pretty neat to have every connect device have its own IP address - then you'll really be able to control your oven from work :D

Well, don't hold your breath on IPv6. Seen anyone rushing to buy new routers and jump through hoops for no immediate visible benefit? Companies are running tight ships these days.

Anyway, if you want to see the Class A IP allocations without trawling the ARIN database manually, read here:

http://www.flumps.org/ip/a/indexa.html

Kevin

Originally posted by sigma


Well, don't hold your breath on IPv6. Seen anyone rushing to buy new routers and jump through hoops for no immediate visible benefit? Companies are running tight ships these days.

Anyway, if you want to see the Class A IP allocations without trawling the ARIN database manually, read here:

http://www.flumps.org/ip/a/indexa.html

Kevin

That's pretty cool, thanks for the link ;)

While it's true that most emails are sent out from the main server's IP and that will inevitably blacklist everyone that has their account/and/or domain sending email out from that same IP/SMTP service, there are still and obviously a few issues where a dedicated IP does give you some advantages, still. Most of the time it's not a big deal. I do still find that there's enough people that use browsers' that won't work (still!), and enough to matter, by the stats I've seen. Some services will still block the IP, some servers will too (like Steve said). After all, there's still resolution issues anyway, and someone's only going to be able to resolve an IP source to one name anyway (that can be for any service blocking the IP, not just the 'search engines' worry people have). I'd still use IP's if I have a choice, but obviously it's not usually needed.

Originally posted by Steve33
Where in the world did you come up with that statement? I didnt read that anywhere.

It came from your own source:

be very careful about where you have your pages hosted. If the hosting service also hosts spammers and pornographers...

If this applied to any host, they would not have said, "be very careful about where you have your pages hosted." In other words, if they suggest to be careful about where your pages are hosted, it implies that certain hosts are blocked and others are not. It implies that you have a choice. Furthermore, they go on to say which ones are blocked: "If the hosting service also hosts spammers and pornographers..." These are the hosts that have their entire servers blocked.

-Lamar