TLS Server Name Indication now in Apache
Apache 2.2.12, which was released yesterday (see the changes), now supports TLS Server Name Indication (SNI), which is an extension to TLS that makes virtual SSL hosting possible. At the moment, every SSL web site requires a separate IP address and that makes SSL deployment more difficult than it could and should be.
Don't get your hopes up, though. Although the extension was defined in 2003, the support for it is still very limited. For example, Apache's adoption means that, for the first time, SNI is supported in a major web server. (For the record, you could have used SNI previously with mod_gnutls, but mod_gnutls is not widely used yet.) It is only now that the extension begins to have a fighting chance.
However, the server-side support is not the main problem, although we are yet going to see it IIS. The lack of client-side SNI support holds it back. Although Internet Explorer supports SNI since 7.0, the fact that it does so only on Vista and more recent versions, means that we will have to wait many years for SNI to become practical.
