[bigiain]

Five (or ten) years ago, NAT was "the solution" – which helped and worked for longer than the doomsayers predicted.

Today, I suspect SNI will be the important stop-gap measure. There's a whole bunch of websites out there on shared hosting with dedicated IP(v4) addresses for their vhost just so they can use SSL certs for https connections. If we can ignore Windows XP users and IE6 users, SNI allows SSL certs on shared IP addresses - if I can think of a few dozen "unnecessary" IP addresses this little web development firm consumes, I suspect big hosting companies could probably find thousands or tens of thousands of similarly used IP addresses.

(Having said that, analytics still shows a startlingly high number of WinXP and IE6 users out there. It'd be interesting to see if any of them ever "convert" in ways that'd require SSL certs? I understand why the use of pirated XP and 10 year old hardware are rampant across the 3rd world, for _my_ clients that demographic is almost certainly not likely to be ecommerce customers... That's a bit of a personally skewed perspective though, there's no good argument to be made that says wikileaks/twitter/gmail users on old hard/software shouldn't get ssl protection, but I suspect high-end bed linen online shops wouldn't be hurt at all by using SNI and thereby increasing friction for IE6/WinXP users…)

[kiallmacinnes]

> I can think of a few dozen "unnecessary" IP addresses this little web development firm consumes, I suspect big hosting companies could probably find thousands or tens of thousands of similarly used IP addresses.

That's the problem. A few million addresses would stretch things out by a couple of months.. But the cost of getting a few million websites onto SNI would far exceed any benefit.

[bigiain]

Perhaps. As well as "returning" a few million addresses, it'd also plug one of the drivers behind demand for new addresses (I've got no idea if it's just my blinkered little web-dev worldview talking here - anyone actually know what the big consumers of new ipv4 addresses are doing with them? Is SSL certs for websites a significant consumer?)

If my view is even vaguely supportable - I see things happening that give me some optimism - WHM/cPanel, a fairly significant webhosting management system, rolled out SNI support earlier this year (a few months behind schedule, but it's out now and it works). I assume Plesk and other webhosting management packages are doing the same thing. Perhaps this'll stave off the ipv4 apocolypse by longer than expected? (Or perhaps I've got no idea about what's really going on out there…)