Shared IP hosting question

[sneskid]

I've read up on 'Shared IP hosting' from several places (ex wikipedia) but they only provided limited information.

I've asked this question in several other places, but never get a response. Maybe I'm just not phrasing it right... I'll try again.

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I understand with Shared IP Hosting there are many domains under the same IP address (typically same server). To access a specific domain the client must send extra info either using headers or as part of the request URL.

I've seen it done before my eyes, but I am no longer in contact with the person that did it.

The reason I want to know:
I work a lot with PHP/Flash/Javascript and was looking for a way to bypass the DNS lookup, which should speed up the requests.

The client does a DNS lookup when the URL is in the form of "http://www.example.com" to figure out the IP address of the server. I don't know if that info is cached, and I'd rather not chance it.

If my script already knows the IP address of the server I should be able to bypass the lookup with something like:

"http://11.22.33.44/?host=example"
or
"http://11.22.33.44/" + headers: "host=example\r\n"

My domain is on a shared IP hosting server, and I do not know what info to include, or where, in order to achieve this bypass.

My hosting company is called "ThePlanet.com Internet Services, Inc.". Is there 1 standard way that Shared IP Hosting works or should I ask the admins at ThePlanet how to achieve what I talked about?

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Hope this post made sense.

Thanks for any help.

[Hostingpuppy]

Not all servers are set up this way, but many are.You could use:

http://11.22.33.44/~example

"example" is not going to really work - you'll have to know the particular weirdness of the server in question. WHM servers, for example, create the username by using the first 8 letters of a domain (although this can be changed). Therefore, example.com's home directory on a WHM server would look something like:

http://11.22.33.44/~examplec

The name is how Apache figures out what domain so serve up. Trying to bypass it as you are is likely going to be problematic in many cases.

[sneskid]

Thank you!
It worked, and I knew it was something easy like that.

Can you elaborate on why bypassing can be problematic?

[Hostingpuppy]

Originally Posted by sneskid

Thank you!
It worked, and I knew it was something easy like that.

Can you elaborate on why bypassing can be problematic?

Mostly because it relies on a few server settings that aren't under your control.

For instance, WHM can be told to disallow access like http://ipaddress/~username

Also, even though WHM's default username for new accounts is the first 8 characters of the domain name, that can be changed so that user joe owns something.com. Therefore, the ~ part of the URL would be http://ipaddress/~joe and not http://ipaddress/~somethin

This also assumes WHM. Other control panels may have different ways of putting this URL together or disallow it altogether.

Glad it worked, though.