Comment by torginus
4 days ago
I'm a networking noob, but would it be possible to extend DNS/HTTPS so as to allow a URL to point to a port other than 443? Doing so would allow each IP address to serve multiple websites/computers making the pool of addresses at least thousands of times larger.
As others have mentioned, there's SNI and host headers to have multiple sites on port 443, but there is also the SVCB/HTTPS aliases (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9460) which will allow having the plain domain alias to other hosts including ones with embedded port numbers. Non-browser support is pretty lacking though.
That’s sort of what HTTP is already doing though no?
Multiple websites can have the exact same DNS record and live on the same physical server / IP address, but the HTTP(S) request must specify what host name it is actually requesting, so the server knows how to serve it.
It is already possible using the Host header and TLS SNI. But traffic still flows through port 443.