RE: [cobalt-users] Moving Virtual Sites To 1 IP Address

["Erica Douglass" <erica@xxxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: cobalt-users-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:cobalt-users-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Dave -
Technical Support
Sent: Wednesday, May 14, 2003 8:46 AM
To: cobalt-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [cobalt-users] Moving Virtual Sites To 1 IP Address

I have a raq 550 where each virtual site has it's own seperate ip
address.
I'd like to move most of the these sites over one specified IP address.
What
would be the easiest way to do this? I was thinking about changing the
TTL
to like an hour for the domains I want to move, change the IP address,
and
then change the DNS records. Does this sound like a feasible way to do
this,
or am I creating a headache that I don't need. Thanks in advance.

Dave
-------

Hi Dave,

Well, first of all, I would ask you why you need to do this. Most
ISPs/hosting providers will provide you with more IP addresses as long
as you can justify them. The general rule for justification is that you
will use 60% of them now, with the understanding that you will grow in
the future.

As someone who has had to move IP ranges twice this year, this isn't
something you want to do unless you absolutely have to (i.e. are moving
hosting providers.) Your customers will need to understand that there
will be downtime involved unless you (the hosting provider) are in
complete control of their DNS. Even if you are in complete control and
you set the TTL to one hour a couple days before you move, some ISPs
(notably AOL) are notoriously slow at updating their DNS caches and your
customers may see downtimes of up to one day. We had one customer who
complained quite loudly during our last move because AOL ignored our TTL
of one hour and only updated it overnight that day -- we ended up giving
them a free month of hosting, even though there was absolutely nothing
we could do about AOL and its slow DNS updates.

As a general rule, we give our customers their own IP addresses in case
they need SSL on their domains. This allows us to justify more IP
addresses. The reason I personally like to justify as many as I can is
so that I won't end up getting 8 IPs here and 8 there and 16 over there.
With 85 domain names hosted, we were able to justify a block of 128 IP
addresses. (We were able to justify a full class C at our old provider,
but our new provider required 60% of them to be pingable within a
week...)

To make a long story short, don't change IP addresses unless you're
somehow required to. If you need more, justify more from your hosting
provider.

Erica Douglass
Lead Web Developer
Simpli, Inc.
http://www.simpli.biz/