I bought a Slicehost VPS (the cheapest, 256MB one, running Ubuntu) because I'm interested in expanding my web development experience/understanding beyond the classroom. I'm hoping to have the Slicehost run (1) a blog, (2) a wiki I can use for private organization purposes (myself and a few friends), and (3) development, in multiple languages (Ruby, PHP, python). What I'm realizing is that there are a number of drawbacks to this. First of all, I'd be launching one gigantic and ugly Apache process for each visitor (not that I expect any), and secondly, that would make configuration a nightmare.

Is there a way that I can run separate Apache processes to handle each program, but do so in a URL-transparent way? I'd like to be able to have blog.mywebsite.com only load the relevant modules and configuration stuff for Movable Type, while having pydev.mywebsite.com load only the modules/config for an Apache running python, and railsdev.mywebsite.com run on Apache/Passenger or whatever. I understand how to do this if I'm willing to have the URLs be mywebsite.com:8081/, mywebsite.com:8082/, etc., but is there a way to have one server listening to \*.mywebsite.com:80 and have it pass requests along to the appropriate servers (which are listening on port 8081-8084 or so)?