Windows Hosting

How to host with multiple IP's

[Brewhaus]

We have recently installed Windows 2003 SBS in order to bring the hosting of our website internally, but also wish to add a couple of personal sites for family (hey, we have the server!), as well as a second business site. Because of SSL for two of the sites, and not wanting to split bandwidth, we have installed 3 network cards, each having its own IP address. However, only one works from the outside world, as Windows seems to assume that we only need one link to the internet. Our internal network is behind another firewall, so I am not concerned about allowing all three IP addresses access from outside... but how can I go about doing this? We had two of the cards working, but after going through the internet connection wizard as I was advised, we are again down to only one working.

[diamondgrl]

I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure that your rate-limiting factor is not your network cards - which should carry pretty much any amount of traffic that is thrown at it, within reason - but your hard drive access speed. After all, your network cards should be able to handle a minimum of 100 Mbps, and your Internet connection is probably only 1.5 Mbps or slower.

If you have multiple hard drives, you can put the sites on different drives. Then if you want, you can actually configure multiple IP addresses on the same network card. But you don't even need multiple IP addresses. You can just change the host header information to include the site name (i.e. list your IP address, then www.example.com and example.com as host headers, then 80 as the port number).

[Brewhaus]

Actually, it is because of SSL on two of the sites that we require the different IP addresses. Two family sites are on one address, and use host headers. Our problem is in getting the second and third IP addresses opened up to internet access.

I do agree with you that the most limiting factor is likely to be the upload speed that we have (just over 1M, our download is over 3M).

It is worth a try, putting additional IP addresses onto the card that is working externally. My question here is will the router recognize the second address and route it accordingly?