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addresses on one interface. The web server can either open separate listening sockets for each IP address, or it can listen on all interfaces with a single socket and obtain the IP address the TCP connection was received on after accepting the connections. Either way, it can use the IP address to determine which website to serve. The client is not involved in this process and therefore (unlike with name-based virtual hosting) there are no compatibility issues.
50: 305:. Accessing the server with the domain name should work again. Users should be careful when doing this, however, as any changes to the true mapping between host name and IP address will be overridden by the local setting. This workaround is not really useful for an average web user, but may be of some use to a site administrator while fixing DNS records. 266:
takes place before the expected hostname is sent to the server, the server doesn't know which certificate to present in the handshake. It is possible for a single certificate to cover multiple names either through the "subjectaltname" field or through wildcards but the practical application of this
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Name-based and IP-based virtual hosting can be combined: a server may have multiple IP addresses and serve multiple names on some or all of those IP addresses. This technique can be useful when using SSL/TLS with wildcard certificates. For example, if a server operator had two certificates, one for
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Circa 1996-1997, the number of distinct IP addresses would have been a good approximation to the number of real sites, since hosting companies would typically allocate an IP address to each site with distinct content, and multiple domain names could point to the IP address being used to serve the
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When IP-based virtual hosting is used, each site (either a DNS host name or a group of DNS host names that act the same) points to a unique IP address. The webserver is configured with multiple physical network interfaces, virtual network interfaces on the same physical interface or multiple IP
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There are two main types of virtual hosting, name-based and IP-based. Name-based virtual hosting uses the host name presented by the client. This saves IP addresses and the associated administrative overhead but the protocol being served must supply the host name at an appropriate point. In
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The downside of this approach is the server needs a different IP address for every web site. This increases administrative overhead (both assigning addresses to servers and justifying the use of those addresses to internet registries) and contributes to
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because many customers can be hosted on a single server. It is also very common for a single entity to want to use multiple names on the same machine so that the names can reflect services offered rather than where those services happen to be hosted.
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for each host name, and it can be performed with any protocol but requires a dedicated IP address per domain name served. Port-based virtual hosting is also possible in principle but is rarely used in practice because it is unfriendly to users.
298:, the web browser will send the IP address as the host name. Since the web server relies on the web browser client telling it what server name (vhost) to use, the server will respond with a default website—often not the site the user expects. 422:
same site content. However, with the adoption of HTTP/1.1 virtual hosting, and the availability of load balancing technology it is possible to reliably host a great number of active sites on a single (or relatively few) IP addresses.
157:(or pool of servers). This allows one server to share its resources, such as memory and processor cycles, without requiring all services provided to use the same host name. The term virtual hosting is usually used in reference to 213:/1.1 support (commonplace today) to include the target hostname in the request. This allows a server hosting multiple sites behind one IP address to deliver the correct site's content. More specifically it means setting the 341:
Many business companies utilize virtual servers for internal purposes, where there is a technological or administrative reason to operate several separate websites, such as a customer extranet website, employee
350:, and intranets for different departments. If there are no security concerns in the website architectures, they can be merged into a single server using virtual hosting technology, which reduces management and 294:(DNS) is not properly functioning, it is difficult to access a virtually-hosted website even if the IP address is known. If the user tries to fall back to using the IP address to contact the system, as in 194:*.example.com and one for *.example.net, the operator could serve foo.example.com and bar.example.com off the same IP address but would need a separate IP address for baz.example.net. 330:
Virtual web hosting is often used on a large scale in companies whose business model is to provide low cost website hosting for customers. The vast majority of
255:. Equally two subdomains of the same domain may be hosted together. For instance, a blog server may host both blog1.example.com and blog2.example.com. 823: 783: 778: 672: 498: 267:
approach is limited by administrative considerations and by the matching rules for wildcards. There is an extension to TLS called
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The biggest issue with name-based virtual hosting is that it is difficult to host multiple secure websites running
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A workaround in this case is to add the IP address and host name to the client system's
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particular, there are significant difficulties using name-based virtual hosting with
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This article is about virtual domain name hosting. For virtual machine hosting, see
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A technical prerequisite needed for name-based virtual hosts is a web browser with
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Fielding, Roy T.; Reschke, Julian (June 2014). Fielding, R.; Reschke, J. (eds.).
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and the number of separate servers required to support the business.
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For instance, a server could be receiving requests for two domains,
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Name-based virtual hosts use multiple host names for the same
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IP-based virtual hosting uses a separate 531: 517: 334:customer websites worldwide are hosted on 161:but the principles do carry over to other 447: 134:Learn how and when to remove this message 251:would make the server serve pages from 14: 1052: 538: 512: 338:, using virtual hosting technology. 72:adding citations to reliable sources 43: 24: 399:"How many active sites are there?" 220:, which is mandatory in HTTP/1.1. 25: 1071: 494:Apache Virtual Host Documentation 487: 283:versions) which do not implement 149:is a method for hosting multiple 48: 168:One widely used application is 59:needs additional citations for 427: 391: 13: 1: 1021:Web content management system 384: 235:to the same IP address. 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Index

Virtual host
host machine
Virtual private server

verification
improve this article
adding citations to reliable sources
"Virtual hosting"
news
newspapers
books
scholar
JSTOR
Learn how and when to remove this message
domain names
server
web servers
Internet
shared web hosting
web server
SSL/TLS
IP address
IP address
HTTP
HTTP header
resolve
HTML file
SSL/TLS
handshake
Server Name Indication

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