Virtual hosts are an important part of many HTTP servers, and they can be used in different ways. Your web server serves the pages on your site, and the server and browsers are used together to access your site. This is known as the host/client relationship. If you only have one site for a server, then that server is known as dedicated. A dedicated server is usually required if your site has a large amount of traffic. Virtual hosts are run from the same server, and in this way, one server can host more than one website simultaneously, while each site is accessed through individual DNS names.

If you use virtual hosts, visitors to your site won't be able to distinguish whether your site is on a dedicated or virtual server. While hosts have unique IP addresses, a virtual host doesn't always have a separate IP address. Your virtual host may be name based or IP based, and the only virtual hosts that share IP addresses are name based. Using a virtual host is useful for times when you wish to manage more sites on one server. The intricacies of this setup can be explained by hosting companies online such as Mind Centric.

Since virtual hosts don't need individual IP addresses, they were developed to help work within the massive growth of the Internet. Something needed to be done to solve the problems of the few numbers of unique IP addresses still available. So, software on servers started incorporating non-IP based virtual host support. Virtual hosts are not the only solution to the Ipv4 limitation problem, since Ipv6 is in use by some browsers and servers. This is the most recent IP incarnation. The newest version uses a 128bit format rather than the old 32bit format that the Ipv4 uses, so it allows an exponentially larger number of unique IP addresses.

Virtual hosts can benefit smaller and medium-sized sites too, as long as they don't have high traffic volume. You can access a virtual host through name based or IP-based hosting. If your browser supports HTTP/1.1, you can use that browser to connect to a virtual host, to send you to the correct website. The browser will be able to send you to the address you typed in or the link you clicked on, even if it is one of two sites located on the same virtual server. You can learn more about virtual hosts and how to utilize them for your business through companies like Mind Centric.

If virtual hosts receive requests for two different domains, they can be sent to the same web address. By using this system, you can host a blog on a single server that can send browsers to two separate blogs. Each site will point to a unique IP address, and the virtual hosts server can access the address desired by using a standard application program interface. This is a process that doesn't involve the user, so they can access the sites with no compatibility issues.