Multiple Web Sites on the same server

[Roger Grosswiler]

What is the best practice for getting a single server to host multiple domains?

Specifically, I have access to a few public IP addresses and I would like each web
site to use a unique public IP address, just in case we desire to break out the
sites onto seperate servers.

I want to set up the DNS for the domains to point to the unique addresses from the
start.

Does this make sense?

I need to multi-home the servers NIC, yes?

How do I do that?

What do I need to do on the server to serve out multiple sites?

Thanks in advance,

Hi,
Best is to read about virtual hosts in apache here : http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/vhosts/

They have two concepts, name or ip-based services. Are those servers all from the same domain? Do you use your own
DNS-server for this domain? if you reply with yes, you can handle several sites on the same ip-adress by namedbased
virtual hosts.

As you have to enter all your virtual hosts even in your DNS-server, it's up to you how you handle. I would prefer
having all on one IP-adress, with the appropiate entry in my DNS-Zone (either via CNAME or A entry, CNAME is more
comfortable ;-)).

If you split your sites on more than one server, you just have to change the dns-entry for the host to the new
ip-adress on your DNS-server.

If you do it vi ip-based, think about aliasing your Ethernet-Interface and indicating the appropriate IP-Adresses. The
rest you should also find in the document of the virtual hosting from apache an about aliasing here:
http://home.pacific.net.sg/~harish/linuxipalias.html

HTH
Roger