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Comment by fyver | Hacker News Reader

You can use reverse-proxying and have several servers behind a single front one.

Reverse proxies usually require configuration changes to work. Plus they are single points of failure. Server Name Indication (SNI) is a fairly recent development as well - any apps written before that was widespread, or designed in that way, will have a unique web server for every HTTP based service that has its own separately managed certificate.

Reverse proxying is less common in wild IoT devices, network appliances, and certain kinds of enterprise/line-of-business apps... Surprisingly Microsoft IIS seems to be an exception in that area

The initial RFC for SNI is 20 years old this year. It's been in OpenSSL for 19 years.

Plus - Unless the client is outside of a browser context, you can drop an nginx instance in front of the service without the service having any clue.

Throw a load balancer in front and it's probably much more robust than a single service.

Honestly - reverse proxy support is one of the more magical parts of http.

You're assuming that people are going to use the smartest "best practice" way to do things from your perspective. This is not often what actually happens. It takes forever for people to realize that they should re-architect things to work like this, and that there are benefits to doing so. If you're able to have this happen in a production environment, with no conflicts with other things or other people around you, count yourself lucky...

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