We are proud to announce Host 99 will be fully supporting Server Name Indication.
What is SNI support?
SNI (Server Name Indication) support allows you to host multiple SSL certificates for different domains on the same IP add ress. At the start of the “handshake” process, SNI indicates the hostname to which the client connects. Users who are on shared servers that support SNI can install their own certificates without a dedicated IP address.
In order to experience the full benefit of SNI, all operational servers must run an operating system that supports this functionality, such as CentOS 6.
(SNI) is an extension to the TLS computer networking protocol by which a client indicates which hostname it is attempting to connect to at the start of the handshaking process. This allows a server to present multiple certificates on the same IP address and TCP port number and hence allows multiple secure (HTTPS) websites (or any other Service over TLS) to be served off the same IP address without requiring all those sites to use the same certificate. It is the conceptual equivalent to HTTP/1.1 name-based virtual hosting, but for HTTPS.
Name-based virtual hosting allows multiple DNS hostnames to be hosted by a single server (usually a web server) on the same IP address. To achieve this the server uses a hostname presented by the client as part of the protocol (for HTTP the name is presented in the host header). However when using HTTPS the TLS handshake happens before the server sees any HTTP headers. Therefore it is not possible for the server to use the information in the HTTP host header to decide which certificate to present and as such only names covered by the same certificate can be served from the same IP address.
In practice, this means that an HTTPS server can only serve one domain (or small group of domains) per IP address for secured browsing. Assigning a separate IP address for each site increases the cost of hosting, since requests for IP addresses must be justified to the regional internet registry and IPv4 addresses are now in short supply. The result is that many websites are effectively prevented from using secure communications over IPv4. IPv6 naturally deals in blocks of IP addresses at a time so is unaffected by this issue.
How SNI fixes the problem
SNI addresses this issue by having the client send the name of the virtual domain as part of the TLS negotiation. This enables the server to select the correct virtual domain early and present the browser with the certificate containing the correct name. Therefore with clients and servers that implement SNI, a server with a single IP address can serve a group of domain names for which it is impractical to get a common certificate.
SNI was added to the IETF’s Internet RFCs in June 2003 through RFC 3546, Transport Layer Security (TLS) Extensions. The latest version of the standard is RFC 6066.
(SNI) will only be available to Non PCI Compliant Regulated Accounts at this time. More details regarding SNI will be posted periodically on our blog and social media.
