Re: What's a "normal" ratio of web sites to IP addresses...

[Owen DeLong via NANOG <nanog () nanog org>]

> 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