Multihost

Multihost is a term used in information technology to describe architectures, networks, or services that involve more than one host. It can refer to systems where multiple physical or virtual machines participate in delivering a service, or where a single service is reachable from or exposed to several separate hosts.

In networking, multihost deployments describe environments in which multiple hosts share a common resource, operate behind a load balancer, or participate in a clustered service. Such configurations can improve reliability and availability but require coordination, synchronization of state, and careful addressing to avoid conflicts.

In hosting and software deployment, multihosting denotes hosting multiple tenants, sites, or services on a single server or virtualization layer. It enables efficient use of hardware and simpler management at scale, but it also demands robust isolation between hosts or containers to maintain security and performance.

Common considerations in multihost environments include resource management, networking configuration, and fault isolation. Performance can be affected by contention for CPU, memory, or I/O, and security depends on how well processes, containers, or virtual machines are isolated from one another.

Related concepts include multihoming, which involves multiple network paths for redundancy, multi-tenancy, clustering, load balancing, and virtualization. Multihost architectures are found in data centers, cloud deployments, enterprise networks, and modern web services.