Virtual hosting

Virtual hosting is a web server that appears as more than one host on the Internet; the apparent host names distinguishes one host from another one. Using virtual hosting we can run multiple web services, each with a different host name and URL, that appear to be separate sites.

For example, the following two virtual hosts can be on the same computer:

The virtual hosts are internally configured to use unique sections of the host server's document space. A user must reference the virtual hosts only by their individual domain names. Users do not need to know any extra path information.

Access to resources that use virtual hosting is possible because the HTTP/1.1 specification requires client browsers to include in any request the HTTP Host header. The Host header contains the host name of the server where the requested resource is located.

Parent topic: Virtual Hosting