A "virtual host" looks like an entire website to the outside world, but really it is handled by a webserver that is (typically) handling many such virtual hosts at once.

Many commercial web hosting providers do not provide you with an actual machine--rather, they set your site up as one virtual host out of many running on a high performance server.

\VirtualHost is also a directive used by the [[Apache]] web server (and perhaps others) to set up a virtual host.

h2. Other resources

* "What is a virtual host?":http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/V/virtual_host.html - a definition from webopedia
* "Virtual hosting":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_host - Wikipedia
* "Apache Virtual Host documentation":http://httpd.apache.org/docs/vhosts/

category: [[Glossary]]