NAT Forwarding - any way other than ports?

[imported_Septimus]

Hi there,

In a bit of a pickle as I'm moving from NYC, where I have 100 Mbit down/20 up + 5 static IPs for $120/mo, to the Lehigh Valley in PA, where they want $200/mo for any static IP service at all and that's 12 down/2 up. The same service without the static IP is $55/mo and I'm trying to figure out if I can make it work.

I run a couple of small development servers that need to be accessible by a few people outside my network. I know I could always just use port forwarding and set up alternate ports for web or FTP servers or else (more likely) just set up a VPN. So I'm not up a creek, but I had a thought about a possible solution and I wonder if there are any products out there that will do it.

Are there any NAT routers that will forward traffic to a particular address based on the hostname? That is, if I have my one public IP of 1.2.3.4 and a bunch of internal ones, is there a router out there that I can configure such that 'all traffic to server1.mydomain.com goes to private IP #1; all traffic to server2.mydomain.com goes to private IP #2'?

Or is regular old port forwarding my only friend here?

Thanks very much!
S

 

[imagoon]

Host name based service selection is normally a function of the server / daemon itself. The routers themselves don't pay attention to it. In some cases it would near impossible to track because protocols like FTP don't embed site names.

 

[imported_Septimus]

Ahh, that makes sense. Ah well. Figured it was worth a shot. Thanks!

 

[RebateMonger]

Windows ISA Server can serve as a front-end router and can direct incoming web requests based upon Host Name. I imagine some other PC-based firewalls/routers can do the same.

Barring this, I'd probably go with using non-standard ports for the web sites.

 

[Emulex]

you put some SSL thought into that plan?