Comment by gzread
4 hours ago
Actually, does it? Yes, the obvious upside when I type in slack.com instead of 123.45.56.67 is very good. Does this same upside apply to addresses I don't type in? What's actually the advantage of addressing one of foobarcorp's infinitude of servers uasing the string "123-45-57-78.slp05.mus.foobar.com" instead of "123.45.57.78"? It seems to just waste bytes. And most communication is of the latter sort - an app talking to its own servers managed by the same company.
BGP can be hijacked. Anycast IPs exist. Rolling out a new release when one of your IPs is unavailable could be a severe challenge. SVC records are actually kinda neat.
All of that's a problem with DNS too, even updating the IP. You could still use it to get the initial entry point if you wanted. But when you serve a webpage with an automatically generated pointer to image3.yourdomain, the only reason not to make that an IP is HTTPS, and LE just started issuing IP address certificates. Think about it - it saves a few round trips.
If the IP is anycast, all the better.