How do hosting companies do it?

[Zach]

I've seen hosting companies that have seperate little server config files in each www directory, allowing web based config apps for customers. Can Apache do that? Anyone know?...

 

[Damaged]

I'm sure those are all little scripts/programs that they've written themselves. It's not a matter of Apache doing anything.

 

[rahvin]

Each client would get their own chroot'd copy of apache. You isolate the process and give it it's own ID's and you don't have to worry about anyone compromising it because it shouldn't effect the rest of the server. You can buy 1U rackmount servers and probably host a dozen or more sites per server (depending on the load each site generates). Pretty simple and painless setup, just use standards in setup and you can setup a new site in a few minutes and the owner would have complete process control.

 

[Damaged]

Or you could do that. I just wasn't quite sure exactly what this person was getting at, so I took the easier explanation. At least less typing.

 

[Zach]

I've tried running apache with seperate config files, and it was a no-go for me, so I figured it was more than scripts.

It seems like seperate instances would be too wasteful though, those Colbalt Raq's can handle like 100+ web sites and they seem to have seperate config files. Although, I suppose they could be using .htaccess files extensivly.