(If the title of this entry doesn’t make any sense, or even if you only find it a little bit funny, it’s because it’s a networking in-joke. Trust me, it’s funnier than you think.)

I never started off wanting to be an ISP.

However, as time goes on I’ve ended up hosting multiple Web sites on my single server. I’ve recently run into a real problem with hosting two different sites, each of which offer secure encryption. For technical reasons, which I won’t go into, you can normally only have one secure site per network card and/or Internet address (IP).

There is a standard workaround for this, but it’s not perfect and it introduces problems that aren’t acceptable to everybody. (It means having each site at a different non-standard address, and many companies with firewalls will block these by default.)

I’m still working on a better solution. It will all come down to me either spending some money on more equipment to sit on the floor under my desk, or doing something fiendishly clever with various bits of my server’s operating system that a more sane person wouldn’t even think about.

Currently, I’m going with the free(ly) insane approach. I still have a couple more avenues to pursue. After that, if nothing pans out, I guess I’ll have to go with the crowd and take out my wallet.