Idea: Reducing DNS Lookups By Using IP addresses

[vandread]

Now I do not know if that method is possible or practicable at all but I thought about reducing DNS lookups which come from advertising mainly on my sites.

Would it be possible to replace the domain names by IP address, at least theoretically? Are there any dangers associated with that?

[bill]

If the domain name changes IPs in the future you would have trouble.

[johnmoose]

That's the whole idea of DNS, no need to worry about the IP address. And people remember names a whole lot easier than 12 digit numbers. Its the phone book of the Internet.
You can do it, if its only for local hostnames and you host them yourself. But the client does cache IP resolved addresses too for a certain amount of time. So its only the first time resolving that takes a couple of milliseconds, the second time it should be cached locally (be that on disk or in memory).

[maximillianos]

I think it is an interesting idea, and it might save you some time, but like others said, it is risky and adds a layer of maintenance.

You would have to stay on top of the current IP addresses for all domains you did this for, and update accordingly.

That, or you could schedule a job to monitor it and have it run ever 10 minutes or something and use it to keep a "live" cached copy yourself of the IP addresses... That would work.

[KenB]

Using the IP address could be a "poor mans" means of putting files that support a webpage on a "cookieless" domain, which is one way to speed up page loading. The key would be to be the one that controls the IP address and for it to be a dedicated IP for your website.

Thoughts on this?

[claus]

Back in the old days when I started using the internet, IP-addresses in URLs were very common. It was only later, with the emergence of www, that "vanity" domain names started to get popular. So, yes of course you can use IP-addresses :)

a "cookieless" domain

- what does this mean?

[mattur]

a "cookieless" domain

- what does this mean?

Serving static content from another domain to prevent main-domain cookies being sent with each request, thereby minimising request overhead [code.google.com]