PRO/CONS OF VIRTUAL HOSTING SERVICES

  
  
  
  
>"Wasting" this space enables the use of URLs like:
>   http://user.domain.foo/
>
>While your suggestion will only enable URLs like:
>   http://user.domain.foo/bar/
>or http://user.domain.foo/~bar/
>
>From a marketing point of view it makes A LOT of difference.
>I wouldn't call it "wasting" address space. I would preffer the term
>"utilizing" address space.
  
Exactly - we have gone to a lot of trouble to set up an URL of the form
http://company.com/, precisely because we want *our* customers to get to
*our* pages in a transparent and intuitive way. Daniel's suggested method
would require either that:
  
1. the address published is "messy" (eg http://company.com/company/), which
would put us at a competitive disadvantage (ie others already have
http://other_co.com/), and is counter-intuitive to established practice,
  
or
  
2. the customer goes through a provider-specific index page, which may have
links to very many (probably entirely unrelated) sites.
  
Neither is acceptable for marketing reasons - Marketing may be a dirty word
in some quarters, but IMHO it's here to stay, and it pays the bills.
  
Andrew J Cowie
Royal Insurance plc (http://royal-group.com/)
  
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