To have the freedom to put our sites up anywhere we want, we can use mod_mysqlvhost. This module reads the document root for a domain from a MySQL database table and will thus need a running MySQL server. mod_mysqlvhost gives the maximum flexibility, usually at a small performance cost.

Many Web projects already use MySQL as a backend database, so the cost of running MySQL does not need to be taken into the calculation. For all other installations, the cost of running a MySQL server would probably not be worth the additional flexibility.