headless on hosted server - DNS or perm IP address

[bonytony]

I have a server operated by a provider. They have supplied me with two permament ip addresses and I am trying to figure out how best to use these.
I want to run several virtual machines which each provide a webserver etc for a customer.

My gut feel is that is best to attach a VM to the spare IP of the machine then buy more IP addresses as I need them and attach these to the server.

I have been looking through the manual but am still unclear how to do this. Anyone know ?

I am also aware of my newbyness in this sort of internet server stuff so I would be interested to hear other arguments.

[jowilkin]

Unless the customers are willing to share IP addresses and use funny port numbers to connect, you will definately need more IP addresses (one per web server).

Look at "Bridged Networking" in section 6 of the virtual box user manual for some more detail.

[bonytony]

I think you're right there, I was hoping there might be some way to share the ip address but that was naive

I'll let you know how it goes, thanks for the input, you've saved me a lot of time.

[baf]

If you don't need https then one possibility is to use one server as a frontend which distributes jobs to the inner servers. These do not need a real ip-address in this scenario and can be on "internal network" with private ip addresses. And the fronend could be your "real" server.

[MKhaos7]

If you don't need https then one possibility is to use one server as a frontend which distributes jobs to the inner servers. These do not need a real ip-address in this scenario and can be on "internal network" with private ip addresses. And the fronend could be your "real" server.

True enough.
The separation between different servers would be done based on the http request.
Have your heard about virtual servers, in the context of Apache? If this is what you want you wouldn't even need virtual servers, your real one would be more than enough.

Cheers