While the default Apache configuration is good enough for mostWeb applications, there's a lot more under the hood of the planet's mostpopular Web server. In this article, find out how to create virtual hostson a single Web server, and use Server-Side Includes for greaterflexibility in your HTML pages.
# host setting for melonfire-alpha.com
<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
ServerAdmin webmaster@melonfire-alpha.com
DocumentRoot /www/melonfire-alpha.com
ServerName melonfire-alpha.com
ErrorLog logs/melonfire-alpha.com-error_log
CustomLog logs/melonfire-alpha.com-access_log common
</VirtualHost>
# host setting for melonfire-beta.com
<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
ServerAdmin webmaster@melonfire-beta.com
DocumentRoot /www/melonfire-beta.com
ServerName melonfire-beta.com
ErrorLog logs/melonfire-beta.com-error_log
CustomLog logs/melonfire-beta.com-access_log common
</VirtualHost>
And you can test it by restarting the Apache server and pointing your
browser to the Web sites http://melonfire-alpha.com and http://melonfire-beta.com (note that you may need to update your DNS tables as well for this to work).
On the assumption that you have created HTML files for each host and stored them in the locations you've specified for the DocumentRoot directive, Apache should display the appropriate index page for each server. And if you take a look at the log files, you should see separate log files for each virtual host.
As you might imagine, the ability to host multiple Web sites on a single server is an elegant - and economical - solution to the problem of limited IP address range in the IPv4 protocol. It also allows Web hosting services to "sub-host" multiple client domains on a single server, and developers to run multiple Web sites on their development and test systems for simulation purposes.