# Jails vs. Virtual Hosts



## cwhitmore (Apr 15, 2009)

I've setup a domain with personal information on it and would like to setup a second domain with a wiki, blog and forum. Would it be best to setup a jail for the second domain or do I just need a virtual host?


----------



## Carpetsmoker (Apr 15, 2009)

A jail is, to quote jail(8), to ``imprison process and its descendants''.
It's a form of cheap virtualisation, basically you can see a jail as a FreeBSD system running inside a FreeBSD system.

This is useful for added security, you can run a webserver inside a jail, if there is a (serious) security issue with the webserver, then a (potential) attacker can only get access to the jail, and not to the the underlying system and/or any other jails (Which may be running MTA's, FTP servers, etc.)

This is something quite different from a virtual host setup, you can use jails for virtual hosting, you can share a machine with 10 clients and each one has their own setup ...
If you're just looking to run two domains on one server, then you should  just use a normal virtual server setup ...


----------

