What's a "normal" ratio of web sites to IP addresses...
…in a run-of-the-mill web hoster? This is really a question specifically for folks with web-site-hosting businesses. If you had, say, ten million web site customers, each with their own unique domain name, how many IPv4 addresses would you think was a reasonable number to host those on? HTTP name-based virtual-hosting means that you could, hypothetically, pile all ten million into a single IP address. At the other end of the spectrum, you could chew up ten million IPv4 addresses, giving a unique one to each customer. Presumably the actual practice lies somewhere in-between. But what ratio do people in that business think is reasonable? 10:1? 100:1? 1,000:1? I’m happy to take private replies and summarize/anonymize back to the list, if people prefer. Thanks! -Bill
I don't know that there is a normal as it likely depends heavily on the revenue per customer and the service's tolerance for giving out IP addresses. It also depends heavily on the back end infrastructhre and what kind of service is being provided. There's probably massive scale behind Cloudflare IP addresses. There are middleware-style ecommerce and blog platforms where there is the same, i.e. lots of sites behind any given IP because every customer receives the same service from the same software; likely thousands or more per IP in that case. As you get more custom, probably far less per IP as that's when sites tend to start being mapped to dedicated virtual machines / servers, shared hosting, etc. where it goes anywhere from a few hundred to one site on a dedicated server. Sorry to go off on a tangent but this got me wanting to rant. __ Still, to this day, SEO "experts" continue to guide clients towards service platforms (hosting, ecommerce, blogs, etc.) where they know it remains possible to get an exclusive IP address because they are "sure" that will produce meaningful search positioning gains. I started a thread on this topic on nanog about this back in what I think was 2003 because every business entity had an SEO expert insisting their various websites receive IP addresses on subnets that differed enough to be "distant" from one another because Google would otherwise penalize them. I expressed frustration at that because it ensured sites that had no technical need for an exclusive IP address would get one anyway, wasting a rapidly depleting resource, and costing the provider in the process while they could still get address space. A Google Director, Craig Silverstein, said this wasn't the case, but just casually in a slashdot interview. Matt Cutts later refuted it directly in 2006: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/myth-busting-virtual-hosts-vs-dedicated-ip-ad... And he made the point once more in a 2013 Youtube video. Three semi-official statements on the subject, the most recent nine years ago. So, it hasn't done much to dissuade the SEO experts of continuing to steer their clients towards places they think an exclusive IP will be issued. Fortunately the huge rise of CDN's seems to be getting things back on track, because those can produce more meaningful SEO benefit from the faster transit to eyeballs, putting exclusive IP recommendations on the back burner. David On 3/31/22, 6:19 PM, "NANOG on behalf of Bill Woodcock" <nanog-bounces+dhubbard=dino.hostasaurus.com@nanog.org on behalf of woody@pch.net> wrote: …in a run-of-the-mill web hoster? This is really a question specifically for folks with web-site-hosting businesses. If you had, say, ten million web site customers, each with their own unique domain name, how many IPv4 addresses would you think was a reasonable number to host those on? HTTP name-based virtual-hosting means that you could, hypothetically, pile all ten million into a single IP address. At the other end of the spectrum, you could chew up ten million IPv4 addresses, giving a unique one to each customer. Presumably the actual practice lies somewhere in-between. But what ratio do people in that business think is reasonable? 10:1? 100:1? 1,000:1? I’m happy to take private replies and summarize/anonymize back to the list, if people prefer. Thanks! -Bill
On Apr 1, 2022, at 12:15 AM, Bill Woodcock <woody@pch.net> wrote: …in a run-of-the-mill web hoster? I’m happy to take private replies and summarize/anonymize back to the list, if people prefer.
I asked the same question on Twitter, and got quite a lot of answers in both places pretty quickly. Thus far, 23 answers, with an average of about 490,000 and a median of 1,500. Obviously there are a lot of different factors that go into this, but the two that were cited most frequently were that user who want their own individual IP drive the number down, while large load-balancing/caching infrastructures drive the number up. Thank you all very much. I appreciate the education, and I hope it’s useful to others as well! -Bill
On Mar 31, 2022, at 16:47 , Bill Woodcock <woody@pch.net> wrote:
On Apr 1, 2022, at 12:15 AM, Bill Woodcock <woody@pch.net> wrote: …in a run-of-the-mill web hoster? I’m happy to take private replies and summarize/anonymize back to the list, if people prefer.
I asked the same question on Twitter, and got quite a lot of answers in both places pretty quickly. Thus far, 23 answers, with an average of about 490,000 and a median of 1,500.
Obviously there are a lot of different factors that go into this, but the two that were cited most frequently were that user who want their own individual IP drive the number down, while large load-balancing/caching infrastructures drive the number up.
Thank you all very much. I appreciate the education, and I hope it’s useful to others as well!
-Bill
I would think that the 490,000 is more likely to reflect “web servers” per address vs. “web sites” per address. I think that your mention of load-balancing and caching somewhat prove (or at least support) my speculation here. I suspect that when you talk about “web sites” instead of “web servers”, the number probably falls somewhere in the sub-1k range. For clarity, “https://www.amazon.com/[ <http://www.amazon.com/%5B>…]” is a web site. It is almost certainly served by many many servers. Prior to SNI, it was mostly 1 web server per address. In 2018, major CDNs were just starting to consider ending support for non-SNI clients. Owen
On 31/03/2022 23:15, Bill Woodcock wrote:
…in a run-of-the-mill web hoster?
This is really a question specifically for folks with web-site-hosting businesses.
If you had, say, ten million web site customers, each with their own unique domain name, how many IPv4 addresses would you think was a reasonable number to host those on? HTTP name-based virtual-hosting means that you could, hypothetically, pile all ten million into a single IP address. At the other end of the spectrum, you could chew up ten million IPv4 addresses, giving a unique one to each customer. Presumably the actual practice lies somewhere in-between. But what ratio do people in that business think is reasonable? 10:1? 100:1? 1,000:1?
Not exactly in the web hosting side of the business but I do run a website to IP survey for the gTLDs, the new gTLDs and some ccTLDs each month that covers approximately 248.3 million domain names. It is a complex question because the use of IP addresses for websites has been changing. Some of the IPs with large numbers of websites are actually registrar/hoster holding page websites, sales or Pay Per Click parking, DDoS protection, redirectors or load balancers. There is also the dedicated versus shared hosting issue which sees large numbers of websites on shared hosting and fewer on dedicated hosting with single IPs. Virtual hosting also complicates things because it is not unusal to see multiple domain names in different TLDs (eg: .COM and .ccTLD) pointing to the same IP. There were 12,300,576 distinct IP addresses (IPv4) in the March 2022 survey. That also included a small number of private IPs, bogons and non-routed IPs. These are the counts for the top 20 IPs. 34.102.136.180 26308511 3.33.152.147 8897990 15.197.142.173 8896940 34.117.168.233 5920870 198.185.159.144 3614480 198.185.159.145 3601589 198.49.23.144 3600433 198.49.23.145 3600334 198.54.117.212 3143453 198.54.117.215 3143451 198.54.117.218 3143448 198.54.117.211 3143447 198.54.117.216 3143446 198.54.117.210 3143445 198.54.117.217 3143444 34.98.99.30 2929772 188.114.97.7 2708015 188.114.96.7 2708013 23.227.38.74 2535730 35.186.238.101 2152424 Some of those are load balancers/redirectors/holding/sales/PPC/DDoS protection IPs. The number of IPs with a single website was 6,943,207. The average number of sites per IP was 24.3414. The limitations are that despite the large number of domain names in the survey, it is not a complete survey of all TLDs (some ccTLDs are not covered). Even though websites may have IPs, that does not necessarily mean that there is an webserver running on the IP. (That's getting into Web Usage measurement which determines how websites are being used or not used.) Regards...jmcc -- ********************************************************** John McCormac * e-mail: jmcc@hosterstats.com MC2 * web: http://www.hosterstats.com/ 22 Viewmount * Domain Registrations Statistics Waterford * Domnomics - the business of domain names Ireland * https://amzn.to/2OPtEIO IE * Skype: hosterstats.com ********************************************************** -- This email has been checked for viruses by AVG. https://www.avg.com
participants (4)
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Bill Woodcock -
David Hubbard -
John McCormac -
Owen DeLong