What is Virtual Web Hosting?
Answer:
By far the most common form of hosting, virtual hosting creates a 'virtual' site on one web server. Often times these servers host hundreds of websites simultaneously.
Virtual hosting is cheap, as it allows one shared resource to be used by many different websites. At the same time, due to its general purpose nature, server performance can suffer if one site starts requiring a lot of resources. Additionally, an insecure script on any of the virtually hosted sites can cause a malicious user to have access to all sites on a server, including yours.
The actual term 'virtual hosting' originates from an update in the HTTP protocol. In version 1.0, every website had to have its own unique IP Address. When HTTP 1.1 started to be used (in Netscape 3.0+ and Internet Explorer 3.0+), websites could be accessed even if they did not have their own IP address. The actual process of having multiple sites on one IP was considered to be 'virtual hosting'.
Please note that the above information about HTTP 1.0 vs 1.1 is moot now as many years have passed and all browsers now successfully support the 1.1 protocol.
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