This has probably been asked but I can't find a straight answer, or the ones I found don't work.

I have one domain mydomain.com, resolving to an IP; let's call it 8.8.8.8. The DNS settings also point two subdomains to that IP address with an A record. These are dev.mydomain.com and staging.mydomain.com. Both have an A-record pointing to 8.8.8.8.

On the server (8.8.8.8) I have two virtual hosts files. These are as follows:

staging.mydomain.com.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName  staging.mydomain.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html/
</VirtualHost>

And...

dev.mydomain.com.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName  dev.mydomain.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html/
</VirtualHost>

The problem is:

Regardless of whether I visit or , I always land on staging.mydomain.com (Apache serves these files).

I have restarted Apache and even the server. If I change the order of the .conf files so that dev is first, I always see that. Any suggestions would be so appreciated. Thanks!

update

I find myself back at this problem again! If you know that your syntax is correct, you might have a bad symlink. Delete it and recreate again, restarting apache in-between. I just did this and it solved hours of head-scratching. On CentOS you can check your available vhosts with httpd -S

update 2

I've also found this issue to exist when the apache log files for the virtual host don't exist, or aren't writable.