Date: Mon, 17 Feb 1997 20:55:35 -0800 (PST) From: Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com> To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Apache Virtual Servers (single IP) Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.3.93.970217204721.27674M-100000@sidhe.memra.com> In-Reply-To: <m0vwfUH-00090GC@agora.rdrop.com>
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On Mon, 17 Feb 1997, Alan Batie wrote: > > That's right. Get ready for the lawsuits when your customers find you are > > delivering a substandard product. > > Even in the litigous US, I find that really hard to swallow. Switching them > without warning them about the older browsers perhaps, but calling it > "substandard product" is silly. It's not silly. ISP's have been selling a specific bundle of services under the name "virtual domain" for almost three years now. This requires that each virtual domain have a globally unique IP address allocated to it. Some people are suggesting that they can continue to use this name for a different service in which they do not use a globally unique IP address. But by doing so, they ensure that a significant percentage of WWW browsers cannot reach the domain. Since the ISP has no way of knowing the intended audience for a website they also have no way to predict what percentage of WWW browsers cannot reach the site. In addition, the search engines that use webcrawlers will not index these sites. This is a substandard product. And since there is no cost difference to most ISP's for the IP address or a very low cost difference in some countries, it simply does not make any sense for an ISP to offer a virtual domain without also allocating a globally unique IP address. Anyone who is suckered in by an ISP offering these substandard virtual domains would quite rightly feel that they had been the victims of fraud or negligence on the part of the ISP. This is bad enough for business to get a reputation for ripping off your customers, but if a customer suffers significant damages because of the ISP's ignorance and negligence then they may very well sue and if they do sue the ISP they will almost certainly win their lawsuit. There will be no shortage of expert witnesses ready to testify what commonly accepted industry standards for a "virtual domain" are. HTTP 1.1 host header support is a neat bit of technology but it has no place in the ISP business today. Michael Dillon - Internet & ISP Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-250-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com
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