01/03/10

Hosting More Than One Web Site

Why?
  You have more than one company
  You have a main site and a secure site
  You have an external site and an internal one ('intranet')
  You want a production web site and a development web site
  A new release of Apache is available; you test it alongside
    your main site
  You are a hosting company

How?
  One server (a straw man)
  Run separate servers
  IP-based virtual hosting
  Name-based virtual hosting

One server
  Use subdirectories in htdocs
  Configure them differently (to a limited degree) using
  containers
  But they have the same domain name

Run separate servers
  More than one copy of Apache will run on the computer

  Three approaches

  1) Install Apache twice (in different server roots)
     Can make them quite different, e.g. different
     modules, different combination of static and dynamic,
     different configs
     Run both versions using http -d

  2) Install it once but have two httpd.conf files
     Run it twice using http -f

  3) Install it once, have one httpd.conf file but
     have some conditional containers inside it
     Run it twice using http -D