Talk:Virtual hosting

Very weak article[edit]

This is worse than useless. It starts with a major error -- claiming that "shared hosting" is the same as "virtual hosting" -- and never recovers. It is (presumably unintentional) misinformation from start to end, and needs to be rewritten and/or merged.

The only real mentions of "Virtual Hosting" I can find online are either marketing terms from a web hosting service, or Apache documentation. Any other mentions of virtual hosting I found bleed over into the definition of virtual machines. I'm not finding any evidence that there is virtual hosting (name or IP-based) for anything other than web servers. I'm open to evidence to the contrary, but I would think this should just be merged into Shared web hosting service. Thoughts? Joshua Scott (talk) 04:00, 11 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Virtual hosting is distinct from shared hosting though there is certainly a lot of overlap. Shared hosting is hosting of stuff for more than one entity on the same server (or pool of servers). Virtual hosting is the hosting of stuff for more than one hostname (with different rules for different hostnames) on the same server (or pool of servers). You can have shared hosting without virtual hosting (though it's realatively uncommon because most people want to use their own name) and you can have virtual hosting without shared hosting which is very common.

The term is not limited to webservers, a quick search for postfix virtual hosting turned up http://www.postfix.org/VIRTUAL_README.html for example.

Why don't you merge this with Shared web hosting service?[edit]

Georgewilliamherbert, why do you say Virtual hosting (as described in this article) is different from Shared web hosting service (as described in that article) ? I can see that "virtual hosting technology" is distinct from "virtual hosting service" which implements the technology, but the articles 90% overlapping; no problem talking about both the "technology" and the "service" in the same article. No inter-article links before I came here; seemed like obvious merge to me. —Quarl ^(talk) 2006-01-13 02:32Z

Most importantly, because there are a lot of non-Shared web hosting service applications out there for Virtual hosting web technology. The two are not close to an exact overlap in terms of usage.

Merging, particularly merging towards Shared web hosting service, minimizes or obscures all those other uses for virtual hosting technology. I, personally, have set up ... let's count them... probably 2 dozen virtual webserver systems over the last 5 years, of which 1 was in the business space of shared web hosting service. The others included applications where it wasn't even public facing in some cases (intranets, B2B, etc) and were generally operated and owned by the company using them.

Pointing out that there was overlap is a good thing, and pointing out the lack of linkage is a good thing; merging is in my opinion a major mistake.

This is why I always recommend people (and try to practice) waiting for merges for a week or so, to see what percolates on the Talk pages before you impliment the change... Georgewilliamherbert 02:45, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, would you be happy if we merged "the other way", i.e. shared web hosting service is described as a subset of this? —Quarl ^(talk) 2006-01-13 03:13Z

Hmm. Maybe. There is plenty to potentially say about shared hosting providers which isn't relevant to the technical article, but I don't know that it would be necessarily wrong. Third opinions, anyone? Georgewilliamherbert 03:38, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Virtual hosting services are not always WWW services. You also can have virtual hosting for email, Jabber,... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.224.83.20 (talk • contribs)

Well, the two articles we're talking about are both talking about web virtual hosting only. Certainly other hosting services like email, IRC, DNS, etc., can run services for multiple sites/domains on one machine, but that's a separate topic. We don't need a separate article about DNS virtual hosting since DNS is almost always "virtually" hosted. —Quarl ^(talk) 2006-01-13 20:52Z

http_proxy[edit]

Here, "A workaround in this case is to add the IP address and hostname to the client system's hosts file", mention if one could merely set $http_proxy instead of messing with hosts file.

Doing that would cause two issues, firstly ALL requests would be sent to that server which may not be desirable. Secondly proxy requests are different from regular requests and there is no gaurantee that a normal web server will respond to them in the disired way. Plugwash (talk) 13:14, 6 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]