Editing Virtual hosting (section)

==IP-based==
When IP-based virtual hosting is used, each site (either a DNS host name or a group of DNS host names that act the same) points to a unique IP address. The webserver is configured with multiple physical network interfaces, virtual network interfaces on the same physical interface or multiple IP addresses on one interface<!--yes there is a distinction at least on linux--->.
The web server can either open separate listening sockets for each IP address, or it can listen on all interfaces with a single socket and obtain the IP address the TCP connection was received on after accepting the connections. Either way, it can use the IP address to determine which website to serve. The client is not involved in this process and therefore (unlike with name-based virtual hosting) there are no compatibility issues.

The downside of this approach is the server needs a different IP address for every web site. This increases administrative overhead (both assigning addresses to servers and justifying the use of those addresses to internet registries) and contributes to [[IPv4 address exhaustion]].