I don't follow the author's argument at all. Let's say the restriction on binding to port 80 was removed - in the example provided of 50 users all wanting to run Wordpress, how does that work? 50 processes (especially from different users) can't all bind to the same socket, and the use of nonstandard ports is _explicitly_ rejected ("everyone has to enter your site's web address with a stupid :### at the end of the host name").
This post is not correct, and it shows a extreme lack of experiences regarding actual deployments.
> Back in the early 1990s when the Internet started to go public, many systems and networks still looked like this and many systems still relied on privileged ports as a critical authentication mechanism. So when web sites started to proliferate and everyone started wanting to run their own web servers on their own IP addresses, it was more conceptually obvious and less disruptive to implement operating system virtualization and leave the rest of the stack untouched.
This is the author's main argument and it is very wrong.
The virtualization appeared in 2000's, over a decade later. vmWare made the first release in 1999. Xen was released in 2003. It took a while before the virtualization become fast enough that it could be used as "default option" in server sharing.
And meanwhile, there were a ton of nice systems which allowed many users to share the same system. It is called "shared hosting", and it is still popular now. Usually there is one central webserver, and a "control panel" web app which allows safe control over shared resources (shared web server process).
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[ 56.4 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] thread> Back in the early 1990s when the Internet started to go public, many systems and networks still looked like this and many systems still relied on privileged ports as a critical authentication mechanism. So when web sites started to proliferate and everyone started wanting to run their own web servers on their own IP addresses, it was more conceptually obvious and less disruptive to implement operating system virtualization and leave the rest of the stack untouched.
This is the author's main argument and it is very wrong.
The virtualization appeared in 2000's, over a decade later. vmWare made the first release in 1999. Xen was released in 2003. It took a while before the virtualization become fast enough that it could be used as "default option" in server sharing.
And meanwhile, there were a ton of nice systems which allowed many users to share the same system. It is called "shared hosting", and it is still popular now. Usually there is one central webserver, and a "control panel" web app which allows safe control over shared resources (shared web server process).