IP based Virtual Hosting in Apache Web Server 1.3.34

This document details the procedure and decisions that are made to configure Apache Web server version 1.3.34 to host multiple domains with multiple IP addresses. This procedure can be expanded upon to enable not-only the hosting of individual domains to individual IP addresses, but also a hosting setup in which some domains share IP addresses, which others have their unique IP addresses and even situations where a single domain has more than one IP address allocated to it.

Procedure

1. Point all your IPs to the same server
2. Configure your httpd.conf in apache to handle the IP addresses and hosted domains in a modified virtual hosting setup with each IP handling only one domain name
3. Restart your web-server

Here is sample configuration for section 3 of the httpd.conf file to implement IP-based virtual hosting in Apache Web server 1.3.34

#===============
<VirtualHost 111.22.33.41:port>
DocumentRoot /www/domain
ServerName www.yourfirst.tld
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost 111.22.33.42:port>
DocumentRoot /www/domaintwo
ServerName www.yoursecond.tld
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost 111.22.33.45:port>
DocumentRoot /www/domainthree
ServerName www.yourthird.tld
</VirtualHost>
#===============

Features and Benefits

Having websites that are unrelated in content on association hosted on a single IP address is said to have some SEO consequences especially if one of the domains sharing an IP address gets banned from one of the search egnines' indexes/indices. To avoid t his collective punishment, it advisable to pay the extra cost of having multiple IP addresses to partition the reputations of your websites (especially if you are hosting websites whose content you do not /cannot control)