Why does one need more than one dedicated IP address?

[toloratedmeat]

Why does one need more than one dedicated IP address? What benefits are there of having 4?

These are the questions that haunt me.

[The Real Rebel]

Well 1 IP address can do someone but if you are sharing the IP address for different websites and if you needed a SSL for a secured address you will need a separate IP.

As well for name servers, normally NS1.yourdomain.com and NS2.yourdomain.com you would normally have 2 separate IP addresses,

First off, you really do need two IP's, even if they point to the same Slice. Yeah, it's politically a *bad thing* to have both your nameservers served by the same daemon (or even by the same city!), since that puts all of your eggs in one basket, but for educational, study or play purposes, it's actually not too bad, since if the server isn't functioning, there's not much point to resolving the hostname anyway!

(Yes, it IS possible to register multiple nameservers under one IP, but many registrars will decline to do so, and it can actually create some odd problems when you do that - regardless, the registrar likely makes it impossible to delegate your domain to only one nameserver, and some check that the IPs of the nameservers are in fact different).

Hope them 2 reasons help you a bit to understand xD LOL!

[Sharky]

If you use SSL, it's tied to the IP, so in effect, only one secure domain per IP.

[TechAsh]

Recently Apache and OpenSSL have developed Name-Based SSL Virtual Hosts. Which allows multiple SSL sites to be hosted on one IP (I've got it set up on my VPS), but the problem is that it's not very easy to set up as it requires both OpenSSL and Apache to be recompiled.

[The Real Rebel]

Nice, Have to check that one out :D

[toloratedmeat]

Thanks for the replies guys. So I shouldn't have all my nameservers pointing to one IP?

[Corey]

Name servers are the number one reason I see people ordering another IP. Technically you should have name servers on separate servers for redundancy which would also mean two IPs. If they're on the same server though I don't see why you can't use the same IP, some places do require two IPs regardless though to make a domain work.

[The Real Rebel]

Hey corey maybe you could give people on the vps an extra ip??? Just a thought... j/k money lol...

It would be good to have 2 though, easier to set up name servers then :D

[Corey]

Hey corey maybe you could give people on the vps an extra ip??? Just a thought... j/k money lol...

It would be good to have 2 though, easier to set up name servers then :D

I'd say less than 20% of our current VPS users have more than 1 IP. We have to pay for IPs and to offer the lowest prices we decided to only do 1 per VPS and offer more at an additional cost.

[Sharky]

How feasible would it be to offer some sort of shared IP that can be used as a second nameserver, that simply (or maybe 'transparently' would be a better word) forwards the request on to the users own nameserver?