secure hosting using a proxy
One thing I didn’t cover in my post about secure web hosting is how to do virtual hosting when you’re running different instances of the web server (be they in a virtualized environment, a chroot, or just different users on the same host, or even a standalone server like Tomcat, JBoss, Weblogic, Ruby on Rails, etc.).
Note that you can’t host secure (SSL) sites via any kind of name-based virtual hosting, because SSL happens before HTTP. However, you can do IP-based virtual hosting, meaning that you need an IP address for each secure site.
A simple approach is to set up Apache to proxy requests from your primary server to the actual client server. IBM Developerworks has an excellent article on this, complete with an image that underscores the compartmentalization aspect I was hitting on before:
In this illustration, the “backend servers” can be on separate hosts, virtual hosts, or the same host (as long as each web server instance uses a different HTTP port).
