Reading RFC1034 [1], my interpretation is that domain names with or without a trailing dot should be treated the same. That is, these two addresses should give the same response: www.example.com www.example.com. Virtual hosting in Jetty does not take this into consideration since the comparison between request.getServerName() and the virtual host names is done with a simple equalsIgnoreCase(). (See ContextHandler line 618). Looking at other web server implementations I see that Tomcat will treat these addresses as different (similar to Jetty), while Apache Httpd will treat them as the same. I have a feeling that Apache Httpd has the correct and least surprising behavior in this case. [1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1034.txt