risk of IP banning

don't want to risk other sites on my server

[4eyes]

We have our own server and one of the domains on it will use cloaking - if discovered will this risk the whole IP getting banned, or just the domain in question.

[2_much]

Hi 4eyes, and welcome to WmW!

It depends on the engine, some ban by IP, others by domain, others might go so far as to ban a class C depending on the degree of perceived "damage"...

[4eyes]

thanks 2_much

Thats scary. Am I right in assuming that the risk of getting an IP banned is low as long as the cloaking is 'ethical' and discrete. Or is it all a risk?

[mivox]

Since ARIN has 'strongly encouraged' ISPs/web hosting companies to use shared-IP hosting, many websites share IPs with other, usually unrelated sites...

Most search engines only ban by domain name, unless they know an IP number/class C is solely owned/used by the subject of their ban.

[Brett_Tabke]

Ah, but cloaking is a serious issue to se's. If it is done correctly, there shouldn't be a problem. If you push the envelope, they can bite back real hard.

[bobriggs]

Sorry in advance if this is in the wrong forum, but seems to be close to topic...

I don't understand shared IP hosting completely. I know that you can put multiple domains on a single host computer (I've read a little about Apache servers), and that a domain name request will be routed to the correct (subdirectory???) on that server. But I thought that entailed multiple IP's for that single computer.

For example, if I know my domain is at 1.2.3.4, then shouldn't any request for [1.2.3.4...] pull that web page? If the domain is shared, how would the server know which page to fetch?

Or am I confused by the phrase 'shared IP'?

TIA

[DaveAtIFG]

>Or am I confused by the phrase 'shared IP'?

I think you may be. My understanding of a "shared IP" is that multiple domain names are all available at the same IP. How this is actually accomplished on the server still remains a mystery to me though...

[Air]

When multiple domains are hosted on a Apache web server using the same IP the server simply returns the first host (domain) defined in it's virtual host containers when the IP is used as the URL.

When the host is specified as the URL then it just matches the host name against entries in it's list, if it is not found it return a 404, if it is found it retrieves the content from the path specified for that host.

[Xoc]

When a web browser sends the HTTP request for a web page, the actual commands it sends are something like this:

Connect to 255.255.255.255 80
GET /filename HTTP/1.1
Host: www.domain.com

The first line is the IP address to connect to and the port number. The next line is the request for the file and the protocol version. The third line tells it which host on that IP address to request from. When the web server sees the "Host" line, it then directs the request to the correct domain on that IP address. You can have an infinite number of domains hosted on a single IP address.

[Canton]

Sorry if I've jumped in a bit late here - I read these posts with interest and understand that multiple domains can point to a single IP.

However, if one wished to point one domain at the root index page of the IP and then point other domains at the index pages of other folders located in that IP's root directory, could this also be achieved?

-Canton

[Air]

>....and then point other domains at the index pages of other folders
>located in that IP's root directory, could this also be achieved?

Yup, you would just define each domain as a separate name based virtual host, and point the "DocumentRoot" for each domain to the folder that contains the index page for that domain.

[qianxing]

I'm not sure with Apache, but with IIS under 2k Server or 2k Adv. Server, you can easily do that by adding new IIS entries with a different host name, and sending them to different folders. I'm assuming Apache is the same, just done in the cfg files.

[JuniorHarris]

Name Base Virtual Hosting can be accomplished with Apache...see Virtual Host Support [apache.org] for more information.