As you may recall from our discussions surrounding DNS in Chapter 8, Managing Domains and DNS a user's browser needs to translate a website's hostname to its IP address via DNS lookups before it can connect and retrieve the desired web content. You may also recall that this doesn't have to be a one-to-one mapping-more than one site can resolve to the same IP address. Apache is flexible enough so that the same server can serve more than one site by a configuration known as name-based virtual hosting.
This recipe teaches you how to set up name-based virtual hosting. Each site has it's own configuration (often kept in its own configuration file for better organization). Based on the site name that appears in the request, Apache then selects from the available configurations to properly serve the desired site.