Hi William, Lu & others,
And it would be very interesting if someone from Ripe NCC can share with us what is the most IP consuming business in the planet.
Dedicated Servers/VPS/Colocation and Datacenter services in General i guess.
Don't forget SSL hosting. Also a lot of hosting companies provide extra IP's for management like IPO, so instead of only 1 IP per server, they would require a second IP per server. Some things could be improved here if hosting companies would only allow that kind of connections on private IP's via a central VPN box. However valid, I don't expect hosting companies to change their behavior in conserving IP's up to a point where they are running out. A question that I have, is will we see (do we expect) implementations of reverse proxies in front of (shared) hosting environments ? It would make things more complex to troubleshoot, but with the current speed of implementations in the field ... I wouldn't be surprised if we would. Regards, Erik Bais