Hosting doorway pages

[webgeneral]

I have just got a dedicated server, the hoster says that they can allocate 70 IP addresses to websites running on this server, but it only has one network card, and is running Microsoft IIS. I have just been told that if more than 5 ip's are allocated to a network card, it can't cope and the server will crash. Any networking guru's who can advise on which view is correct?

[tilt]

The number of websites hosted on a server doesn't depend on the network card. Network cards do not allocate ip addresses.

The number of sites hosted on a server has to do with the cpu and memory of the machine that the server runs on. In iis there is no built-in limit to the number of hosted sites. There is undoubtedly a perceived limit beyond which all your hosted sites will appear sluggish because they are all competing for limited cpu and memory resources. iis can implement "cpu-throttling" which limits the amount of cpu that any one process can have thereby giving other processes "equal time". Web sites can also be set up to run in process or out of process on iis. This allows some tradeoff of speed vs stability.

This Micro$oft link [microsoft.com] suggests that 250 is a reasonable limit to the number of sites that an iis server can host.