how do web hosting companies give ssh and root to so many users.

[Clint Byrum]

On Sat, 2011-03-05 at 20:12 +0530, Abhishek Dixit wrote:
> Very correct.But I see people given root access in these situations
> also and other than websites people are given a lot of server access
> with dedicated IPs and SSH access so how do they acquire so many
> IPs.Are these web hosting companies responsible for the finishing of
> IPv4 addresses.

I think you'll find that companies that give you a "Virtual Private
Server", or VPS, where your website sits behind the same public IP as
many others will be a bit different than a dedicated real/virtual host.
If it really isn't a shared hosting situation where everybody is under
the same webserver, then everybody is probably behind a massive vhosting
proxy.

In this situation, either the provider won't give you ssh root access,
or, if they do, they'll use an ssh bounce proxy like you described
originally. I've never seen it, but they could also proxy your ssh
connection based on the destination port, so you could do ssh -P 22001
mydomain.com and it would find its way to your server. Again, I've never
seen this in reality, but it would work.

IPv4 exhaustion is real, but there is currently no simple plan to make
everybody move to IPv6, so for the time being.. we all just have to deal
with these little hacks.