Comment by torh
7 hours ago
> Without DNS, you'd need to memorize IP addresses for every website.
This used to be true until virtual hosting came along, allowing for several domains to point to the same IP address, but only for non-HTTPS traffic. Then a bit later we got SNI (Server Name Indication) that did the same thing for HTTPS.
I remember having web servers with 10-12 public IP adresses when I started working. The number of IPv4 addresses needed has been greatly reduced since.
You'd still need to memorize the IP address without DNS, otherwise how would you know to which server to connect?
The fact that a server can serve multiple vhosts and do TLS cert selection via SNI is not related to the lookup of what server to connect to.