virtual hosting advantages

Question

Is there an big advantage between virtual hosting and non virtual setup,

because I am using wamp without virtual hosting. So far I am not find any trouble,

but friends suggest that I'll find a lot of advandage with virtual hosting.
I saw lot of virtual hosting configuration threads, but so far am not find any advantage points.

Is there any advantage with virtual hosting setup?

Answer 1

It depends on your point of view but yes there's very often huge advantages to be had whilst in some very specific scenarios you really want full physical access to your tin - but you're question is more a case of "what is virtualisation", why not investigate that.

Answer 2

Is there any advantage with virtual hosting setup?

As symcbean noted, there are two kinds of virtual hosting, so you may want to be more specific in which type you are referring to - as a general answer, though, there are advantages to both which are dependent upon what you need:

1. Apache's VirtualHost directive allows you to use a single server to host multiple domains (if you need to host multiple sites but you don't want to pay for multiple servers, this is definitely the way to go)
2. Virtual private server (VPS) hosting allows a single server to host multiple virtual servers which, for the most part, act like regular servers (if you don't want to pay for a dedicated server, you can usually find a VPS for a fraction of the price of dedicated hardware)

You can even run Apache with virtual hosts on multiple virtual private servers on a single piece of dedicated server hardware... but if you don't need to host multiple sites (or you don't mind paying for a dedicated server) the added complexity probably isn't worth considering for your hosting needs.

Answer 3

Virtual hosting is primarily for when you need to use the same webserver (apache) to serve numerous websites. For example, a non virtual host setup would only serve somedomain.com, but if you had virtual hosts configured, you could serve somedomain.com, someotherdomain.com, and yetanotherdomain.com, each with their own separate document roots, files, and configuration.

That's a pretty brief and general overview that doesn't do it much justice, but it's enough to start thinking about possibilities.