Professional Apache Tomcat 6

Chapter 15. Shared Tomcat Hosting

Many small businesses do not need, or cannot afford, the cost of running a Web site hosted on a dedicated server or a cluster of servers, and hiring IT engineers to maintain them. A common solution for these businesses is to use a hosting service provided by an Internet Hosting Service Provider. Typically, these hosting services are shared hosting situations in which multiple Web sites can be running on a single computer. Running more than one Web site on one computer is called virtual hosting.

These hosting services allow for the sharing of resources such as the Web server, database server, mail server, firewall, and so on. Thus, all the services that are typically used in this scenario must have built-in support for shared hosting.

The following shared hosting topics are covered in this chapter:

• An introduction to virtual hosting terminology

• Virtual hosting using the Apache HTTP server

• Virtual hosting using Tomcat in both a standalone configuration, as well as with the Apache HTTP server

• Options for tuning Tomcat resource usage in a shared hosting situation

Apache 2.2, Tomcat 6, and mod_jk are used for all of the examples in this chapter.

Virtual Hosting Concepts

In this chapter, the term "Web site" refers to the contents of a distinct Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN), which is served by a Web server. Strictly, a FQDN consists of two parts: a host name and a domain name. For example, the FQDN www.wrox.com consists of the host name www and the domain ...