SSL is a technical justification for separate IP
addresses for web hosts. Virtual servers is another
technical justification for assigning multiple IP
addresses to a single physical server.
What I meant was we require a technical justification to
give a dedicated IP to a customer but many hosts do not,
or they use it as a revenue add by charging for having
a dedicated IP when there's no technical reason for it.
Previously, or maybe still, there was no mandate that web
hosts only assign dedicated IP's when it can be justified.
David
From: Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com
SSL is a technical justification for separate IP
addresses for web hosts. Virtual servers is another
technical justification for assigning multiple IP
addresses to a single physical server.
What I meant was we require a technical justification to
give a dedicated IP to a customer
As do we.
but many hosts do not,
or they use it as a revenue add by charging for having
a dedicated IP when there's no technical reason for it.
The most ridiculous justification these days is the urban myth** that having sites with unique IP addresses, and preferably from different /24 networks, somehow magically increases your "SEO" and lands you atop the pagerank heap.
Previously, or maybe still, there was no mandate that web
hosts only assign dedicated IP's when it can be justified.
ARIN seems to have gone dark on that subject.
** I assume it is myth, but I've never heard anyone from Google make any statements that definitively debunks it. Debunking this pervasive among webmasters and "SEO Experts" myth sure would be a very UN-evil thing to do if true (Hint hint you Google-folk!)
It pisses me off to no end when a sales guy comes to me with a request from a customer for a /20 for a half-rack of web servers. The justification ALWAYS comes down to this inane "search engine optimization" pipe dream. =\
--chuck goolsbee ***
*** Waiting now for ~246 hours for Yahoo!Mail human beings to contact me within their promised "48 hours".
[SNIP]
** I assume it is myth, but I've never heard anyone from Google make any statements that definitively debunks it. Debunking this pervasive among webmasters and "SEO Experts" myth sure would be a very UN-evil thing to do if true (Hint hint you Google-folk!)
Matt Cutts ("Matt Cutts works at the Googleplex and at his blog writes about Google, search engine optimization traps and whatever comes to his mind") has just responded on his blog:
It pisses me off to no end when a sales guy comes to me with a request from a customer for a /20 for a half-rack of web servers. The justification ALWAYS comes down to this inane "search engine optimization" pipe dream. =\
Now you have somewhere to point them 
--chuck goolsbee ***
*** Waiting now for ~246 hours for Yahoo!Mail human beings to contact me within their promised "48 hours".
W
oh, you mean the 'i wanna spam the world and get a /20 of YOUR ip space
blacklisted' excuse? This falls in with the 'voip provider' excuse... VoIP
really? wow, you do LOTS of VoIP to china/korea/japan, all over TCP, all
to random high ports, all that has the 'odd' content of:
"CONNECT mail.blah.com:25"
intersting.. i didn't know that g711 encoding would look so much like
proxy spamming?
The "myth" that I've heard relates to links. From the comments on Matt's blog:
"500 sites under the same IP interlinked in some way will provide the same benefit as 500 sites on uniques similarly interlinked all other things held constant?"
The answer to this question almost has to be "no." A site with hundreds of links from the same IP should not be treated the same as a site with hundreds of links from other IPs. If it is treated the same, scientology-style fake links will proliferate. If it is treated differently, then separate IPs do add value.
Warren Kumari wrote:
That's awesome, thanks Warren (and Matt)! Always nice to add another cluebat to the quiver.
--chuck *
* Now waiting ~273 hours for Yahoo!Mail human beings to contact me within their promised "48 hours". Has *anybody* ever heard back from them? Ever?
No, no, it's absolutely true, and you can tell them so,
and of course you can't provision the space without the
customer filling out the ARIN paperwork to justify it
and sending you a copy so you know what they're really trying to do.
The one customer in 32768 who actually needs it
will have enough clue to be able to fill out the forms,
and the rest of them will spend a month trying to
figure out why they' keep getting rejected.
Meanwhile, get them some IPv6 address space, so they'll be cutting edge...
once Google starts crawling the IPv6 web.
[Sorry - I just get really annoyed when I'm trying to look for some topic
for which the SEOs and phishers have polluted the web space with bogus material
trying to drag traffic to their site by pretending to offer the real content.]
Interesting. Most of the time I've seen customers ask for a /24
or larger blocks is solely for IRC vanity hosts. Is anyone keeping
statistics for this? If not, they should.