19 Jul
2008
19 Jul
'08
9:38 p.m.
Ray Arachelian wrote:
Yes, perhaps in the very early days that was
feasible, but not a bit later, not right around 1994 when we started
seeing www.domainname.tld hosts.
Even then, it was rare for a company to have an internet host that did
nothing but act as a web server. Internet-facing services were
typically either on a single server or distributed onto a small number
of servers, so using standardized hostnames for services allowed the
specific machine assignments to be done transparently, and also allowed
some uniformity for remote users, being able to expect
www.somecompany.com to be a web server, rather than having to know that
for that particular company the web server was
server3.nw.mt.somecompany.com.
It wasn't until more recent times that it has become common practice to
use a dedicated machine for many or all services, and even now, that
trend may be reversing as services are deployed on virtual machines
running on a shared physical machine.
Eric