[Xitami] How-to? Set up multiple web sites using a single static IP address

[Paul Reid]

> 131.227.111.3 - ... you get served ...'basehost.cfg' pages.  If you use
www.cpe.surrey.ac.uk then it finds the string in the request and serves
up the pages defined in www.cfg. 

> However, this only works in recent browsers ...I have just tested this and Netscape 1.0 and 1.2 give the basehost pages for www.cpe.surrey.ac.uk but version 2.0 and onwards behave properly.  I guess newer browsers pass on the request string.  

NetScape 2+ and IE 3+ send the URL of the page they expect to get. NS1
and IE2 don't. 

Basically, any browser made in the last 6 or 7 years will handle
name-based VHosting. 

I'm tracking browser versions on a general-interest page. I don't track
the oldest versions, but in the last 4,580 hits only 5 came from IE3, 0
from NS2, 100 from NS3. I suspect that NS1 and IE1-2 are less than NS2
and IE3, or well under 0.1%. 

Since few Win31 machines are alive, and Win95 came with IE3, the only
large clump of IE2 users will be Win NT4 machines that have avoided any
update of IE. (NT4 shipped with IE2, though many OEM installations and
all MS Office installations put something newer on.) Upgrades of NS and
IE are free. 

Those few people still using NS1 and IE2 are doing it because they want
to. They must know that the Web expects something more today; many sites
fall apart in NS1/IE2 (and yet some quite fancy sites stand up). If they
don't get the site they expect, that's really their choice.

As for palm wappers- I never saw one, in person or as a strange hit on
my site. And I know they are minimal machines. But named VHost just
means that they put the URL in the HTTP request header. They already
have the URL in their tiny mind, so it seems trivial to add it to the
request. And so many sites are really VHosted that I'd think they'd be
useless for general surfing unless they supported it. 

 -PRR