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Comment by spindritf | Hacker News Reader

It's here. IP addresses are costing more and providers are less generous with them. It used to be common to get a handful with a dedicated server, now you get one or two.

I have a friend who runs a small low-cost minecraft hosting. He stopped giving his customers dedicated IPs at all. They get a range of ports and a hostname with appropriate srv records added.

That's the other result, technical work-arounds. You can point to a particular service on a particular port with an srv record, host multiple websites on one IP, even SSL-enabled ones with SNI, etc.

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This is basically how it should work. Prices rise until alternatives become worth thinking about.

that's the economic way of thinking. the engineering way would be to fix the artificial scarcity by implementing a technically superior solution.

But the 'superior solution' is... well, 'sort of', from the economic point of view in this case: it has costs that are, for some people, higher than those of the alternative.

There is always an endless line of other things to deal with in both the economic and engineering realms. Squeaky wheels tend to get the attention in both. When the IP situation causes enough discomfort, there will be an avalanche transition, and probably not a moment sooner.

i agree completely, to my great distaste.

SRV records are terribly underused/underimplemented

That will change if, and probably only if, we can get https://github.com/http2/http2-spec/issues/381 off the ground.

The SRV record is interesting -- basically extending DNS from a (name) -> (address) mapping to (name, service) -> (address, port) mapping

For whatever its drawbacks, IPv6 at least requires few application-layer changes. So I think it's a better solution to the problem than SRV records.

Unfortunately if you have customers using IE on XP or older Android phones, SNI doesn't work and you need to use SAN certificates. EV-certificates with SAN is another huge amount of hassle I wish on nobody.

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