Re: multi-host virtual sites for HTTP 1.2

At 3:47 PM -0700 7/9/96, S.R. Venkatramanan wrote:
>> From http-wg-request@cuckoo.hpl.hp.com Tue Jul  9 15:24 PDT 1996
>>
>> With the Host: header in HTTP/1.1 it is possible to efficiently and
>> easily make a single host act as many "virtual" Web sites.
>>
>> What I'd like to see in HTTP/1.2 is the ability to easily and
>> efficiently make multiple hosts act like a single virtual Web site, so
>> that one can build huge web sites.
>
>I think this is just an implementation, or rather, a site setup/administration
>problem than a protocol defeciency.  How about using a round-robin DNS
>to map the hostname to multiple irons, use the power of such multiple
>hosts in the cluster to serve nfs mounted files from the same or similar pool.

This misses a fair amount of the advantages suggested by Paul. For one,
every host in the round-robin would have to have all of the same content;
Paul's suggestion allows partial redirection. Thus,
http://www.megacorp/root1/... could be redirected to one host that has just
that content, while http://www.megacorp/root2/... could be redirected to a
different host with different content.

Further, Paul's suggestion makes it easier to add redundancy.
http://www.megacorp/root1/... could point to two or more hosts that are at
very different locations. If host1 is down because of hardware or network
failure, a good client would try host2 and so on. Of course, these hosts
have to try to have the same content, but it would be much less (and
therefore more likely to be the same) than for the entire MegaCorp tree.

--Paul Hoffman
--Internet Mail Consortium

Received on Tuesday, 9 July 1996 17:11:01 UTC