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Evil Creamsicle
Regular Member
For a URL to point to a webserver on port 80 [which this is, since you don't have to specify a port to get here] pretty much requires a dedicated IP anyway. There are ways around this but they require more control over the network equipment the server is behind than I am willing to bet that the site admins have. Hosting a website such as a forum on a dynamic IP address is ridiculous and unlikely.
@stealthyeliminator, A quick search based on the public IP of forum.opencarry.org reveals that this site is hosted on Cloudflare [John, feel free to shout at me if I'm incorrect], out of Amsterdam. This is a web hosting company, not a server rental service, which means just purchasing an SSL certificate isn't going to be very useful unfortunately, however it looks like SSL encryption is included in all but their 'free' plan, so if it was a service we really felt strongly about, you'd have to raise about $240 to upgrade the site to 'pro' @ $20 a month for a year.
Cloudflare's site hosting plans
Encryption of your username and password is one, protection of your location is another. Protection against phishing attempts, which I could see since there are a lot of Paypal links and stuff. There are a few benefits but I generally agree that given the nature of this site its probably not that important.
TheQ
Regular Member
I didn't suggest a DYNAMIC IP. I suggested more than one website *may* run off the IP that hosts forums.opencarry.org.
You don't know have much experience with HTTP or managing Apache and your post demonstrates it. Let's say you have IP 1.2.3.4. 1.2.3.4 can host an infinite number of websites via HTTP/1.1. Part of the HTTP/1.1 request header is a tag that says "host: ..."
This Host header is the name if the website you want (not the path, which is after the /, but the host name which is before the /). For example, yahoo.com and google.com can be hosted on the same IP via HTTP/1.1 -- which is the protocol virtually every web server and client has used for the past 2 decades.
Why does SSL change this? The first thing the client does in SSL is connect to the server. As soon as it does, the server sends the client it's public key and any accompanying SSL certificate signatures. The public key and the cert both have the name of a certain domain name/host name. Therefore yahoo.com and google.com can't be in the same IP, because the public key is sent way in advance if the client saying what website it wants to talk to -- thus the server doesn't know which key/cert to send (google.com or yahoo.com)
Anyone with a fair amount of experience managing "virtual hosts" in Apache would know this stuff.
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