• Guillaume Rossolini
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    9 months ago

    @rikudou @voxel
    ASFAIR it used to be even worse than that, because if you didn’t want SNI (for compatibility reasons or whatever), but you still wanted a certificate, you had to have one server for every hostname (because each had its own IP), assuming you could afford the additional IP space

    Granted you didn’t need a physical server, but that was still a bigger cost

    Some servers are more flexible on that front, but early SNI didn’t have those

    • Rikudou_SageA
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      49 months ago

      Yeah, I thought I implied that, but that was the reason SNI started - IPv4 is a scarce resource and thus expensive and the only way to host multiple https websites was having multiple IPs (not necessarily multiple servers, you can easily have multiple IPs for one server, you just had to bind one IP per host), which was adding to the costs quite a bit and hobby projects couldn’t really afford it (well, they could, but not many people are spending hundreds of dollars for a hobby website).

      • Guillaume Rossolini
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        19 months ago

        @rikudou
        Yes, but binding one IP per host is what some web servers can’t do, they bind globally and forward accordingly

        Unless I missed it, that’s always a possibility

        ie httpd can’t do it (at least back then) while nginx can

        Which translates to reconfiguration of the entire infra to replace one server with another, and that’s also a cost