Further proving my point... Joyent is another example of a cloud provider which only gives you one IP address.
It doesn't need to be this way - Linode gives extra addresses for $1/month each (provided valid technical justification, such as the need to run HTTPS).
In digital oceans defense, the right answer if you need an additional ip for an Ssl secured website is to pay $5/month for it and get a free 512m/20G droplet for it. If the price difference between Linode's $1/month extra ip address and DO's $5/month extra vps is a sticking point - you're not indicating that you care very much about privacy/security.
(There may well be other reasons spinning up additional vpses for each SSL secured site doesn't suit you, but a few dollars a month price difference is surely only being used as an excuse for inaction rather that a show-stopping financial burden - at least for anyone in the top 99% of HN's demographic…)
Without SNI, SSL works on an IP address level rather than a hostname level, just like HTTP/1.0 worked at the IP address level and HTTP/1.1 works at the hostname level with the Host header.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I understand SNI and SSL without SNI.
What I'm not seeing is why it's a problem when a host such as DO doesn't allow multiple IP addresses on a single machine.
Is it because you may want to host multiple sites on that machine and use one IP address for SSL?
Oh, nevermind. It's because you may want to support multiple SSL sites on the same box without requiring your clients support SNI. That makes sense.
We really need to just EOL everyone who has a browser without SNI. People like to say that there's still a lot of XP users out there but surely even a reasonable chunk of them are using Chrome or Firefox with SNI support, right?
