Virtual hosting is a method for hosting multiple websites on a single server. There are two types of virtual hosting: Name based virtual hosting and IP-based virtual hosting. IP-based virtual hosting is a technique to apply different directives based on the IP address and port a request is received on. You can assign a separate IP for each domain on a single server using IP-based virtual hosting. Mostly this is used to host different websites on different ports or IPs.

Here we are going to host “www.ipvhost1.com” on IP “192.168.1.227”, “www.ipvhost2.com” on IP “192.168.1.228” and “www.portvhost.com” on IP “192.168.1.228” with Port 8080.

Requirements

Create Multiple IP Addresses On Single Network Interface

To setup IP-based virtual hosting, you must have more than one IP address assigned to your Linux machine. Setting up multiple IP addresses on a single network interface is called IP aliasing. IP aliasing is very useful if you have only one network interface card.

To do this, you need to edit the “/etc/network/interfaces” file.

Add the following lines:

Save and close the file, then restart network service to make these changes take effect.

Setup Multiple Instances of Apache

By default, Apache listen on port 80. For port-based virtual hosting, you need to tell Apache to listen to IP “192.168.1.227” and “192.168.1.228” on port 80 and IP “192.168.1.228” on port 8080.

To setup multiple ports, you need to edit “/etc/apache2/ports.conf”.

Add the following line:

Save and close the file, then restart Apache to make these changes take effect.

Create Virtual Directories

First, you need to make a directory structure which will hold the web pages. This directory is known as DocumentRoot for the domain.

Create three directories for websites “www.ipvhost1.com”, “www.ipvhost2.com” and “www.portvhost.com” under Apache default DocumentRoot directory.

Create Test Web Pages for Each Virtual Host

Create an “index.html” file for each website that identifies specific IPs and Port.

Create an index.html file for “www.ipvhost1.com” virtual host.

Add the following content.

Save and close the file when you are finished.

Create an “index.html” file for “www.ipvhost2.com” virtual host.

Create an “index.html” file for “www.portvhost.com” virtual host.

Setting Up Ownership and Permissions

By default, Apache service runs as a “www-data” user in Ubuntu. You must change the ownership of these three virtual directories to “www-data” so that Apache can read and write data.

To do this, run:

Also, you need to make sure the Apache web root (/var/www/html) directory is readable so that everyone can read files from it.

Create Virtual Host files

By default, Apache comes with a default virtual host file called “000-default.conf”. You need to disable this virtual host file first.

To do this, run the following command.

The next step is to create a virtual host configuration file for each website. The name of each configuration file must end with “.conf”.

Create a virtual host file for website “www.ipvhost1.com”.

Save and close the file.

Create a virtual host file for website “www.ipvhost2.com”.

Create a virtual host file for website “www.portvhost.com”.

After creating the virtual host files, you need to enable the virtual hosts.

You can do this by running.

Finally, restart the Apache service.

Testing Virtual Hosts

Now, it’s time to test the IP Virtualhost. On a computer, open your web browser and navigate to URLs “http://192.168.1.227:80” and “http://192.168.1.228:80”. You should see sample demo pages for IP-based virtual hosting that look like this:

Similarly, to test Port Virtualhost, open your web browser and navigate to URL “http://192.168.1.228:8080”. You should see a sample demo page for Port-based virtual hosting that looks like this:

Conclusion

In this post, I showed the step-by-step procedure to create and enable an IP-based and port-based virtual host on Apache web server. You can easily set up many domains on the same server.

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