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

Fri Apr 1 07:10:36 UTC 2022

On 31/03/2022 23:15, Bill Woodcock wrote:
> …in a run-of-the-mill web hoster?
> 
> This is really a question specifically for folks with web-site-hosting businesses.
> 
> If you had, say, ten million web site customers, each with their own unique domain name, how many IPv4 addresses would you think was a reasonable number to host those on?  HTTP name-based virtual-hosting means that you could, hypothetically, pile all ten million into a single IP address.  At the other end of the spectrum, you could chew up ten million IPv4 addresses, giving a unique one to each customer.  Presumably the actual practice lies somewhere in-between.  But what ratio do people in that business think is reasonable?  10:1?  100:1?  1,000:1?
> 

Not exactly in the web hosting side of the business but I do run a 
website to IP survey for the gTLDs, the new gTLDs and some ccTLDs each 
month that covers approximately 248.3 million domain names.

It is a complex question because the use of IP addresses for websites 
has been changing. Some of the IPs with large numbers of websites are 
actually registrar/hoster holding page websites, sales or Pay Per Click 
parking, DDoS protection, redirectors or load balancers. There is also 
the dedicated versus shared hosting issue which sees large numbers of 
websites on shared hosting and fewer on dedicated hosting with single 
IPs. Virtual hosting also complicates things because it is not unusal to 
see multiple domain names in different TLDs (eg: .COM and .ccTLD) 
pointing to the same IP.

There were 12,300,576 distinct IP addresses (IPv4) in the March 2022 
survey. That also included a small number of private IPs, bogons and 
non-routed IPs.

These are the counts for the top 20 IPs.
34.102.136.180  26308511
3.33.152.147    8897990
15.197.142.173  8896940
34.117.168.233  5920870
198.185.159.144 3614480
198.185.159.145 3601589
198.49.23.144   3600433
198.49.23.145   3600334
198.54.117.212  3143453
198.54.117.215  3143451
198.54.117.218  3143448
198.54.117.211  3143447
198.54.117.216  3143446
198.54.117.210  3143445
198.54.117.217  3143444
34.98.99.30     2929772
188.114.97.7    2708015
188.114.96.7    2708013
23.227.38.74    2535730
35.186.238.101  2152424

Some of those are load balancers/redirectors/holding/sales/PPC/DDoS 
protection IPs.

The number of IPs with a single website was 6,943,207. The average 
number of sites per IP was 24.3414. The limitations are that despite the 
large number of domain names in the survey, it is not a complete survey 
of all TLDs (some ccTLDs are not covered). Even though websites may have 
IPs, that does not necessarily mean that there is an webserver running 
on the IP. (That's getting into Web Usage measurement which determines 
how websites are being used or not used.)

Regards...jmcc
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