Home / server / Questions / 366307
Accepted
Theron Luhn
Asked: 2012-03-05 15:03:58 +0800 CST

Website serving multiple IPs

  • 772

I have to transfer a website to a new IP address on the same server in order to install an SSL cert. Apparently it will take 4-24 hours for the DNS changes to propagate. I asked my host's support if I could serve the website to both IP addresses and avoid downtime, but they said that's not possible. I'm calling BS, it seems to me it should be very possible. So, is it possible? If so, how do I do it?

My server is a VPS running CentOS with Apache and cPanel/WHM.

centos apache-2.2

3 Answers

  1. It's possible to serve the same web content over HTTP on one IP while serving HTTPS over another, sure. I suspect the "not possible" is something to do with the way they re-allocate IP addresses internally.

    • 1

  2. There might be configurations that will not allow this, but in most cases it should work under the following conditions:

    • Both IPs are connected to the same server/VPS
    • The web server is not configured based on its IP but the DNS name
    • You can use both IPs at the same time.

    There will be one major drawback though: If you install the new cert, all clients connecting via HTTPS using the old IP address will get a nasty SSL error message.

    • 1
  3. Best Answer

    cPanel doesn't allow it unless you hack at the httpd config files manually. Most hosts are not going to want to do this, as you may end up breaking cPanel.

    • 1