research.amnh.org is the AMNH science departments' webserver. In addition to research.amnh.org, there is a staging webserver (research-staging.amnh.org) where site updates can be prototyped before they are copied to the production server. All website development is done on the staging server.
research.amnh.org is the production webserver for the Research department websites. It is actually a cluster of two redundant servers. A number of websites are virtually hosted on this cluster. For example, research.amnh.org, www.haydenplanetarium.org, and library.amnh.org all reside here.
Personal websites have URLs on this server, like http://research.amnh.org/~user/, where instead of "user" you substitute the user name. The personal site maintainer actually uploads files to the staging server, research-staging.amnh.org, and they instantly show up on the live server, research.amnh.org. Users should give people URLs to their sites using research.amnh.org, not research-staging. See the section on personal websites for more information.
Any new domain names that should be served on the Research departments' server should be registered as aliases to research.amnh.org.
research-staging.amnh.org is the staging webserver for the Research department sites. A staging server allows you to test changes you want to make to your site, without the public seeing, and without impacting the performance of the live sites in the case of database and cgi applications. Once changes are approved, the prototype files may be published to the live server, using a simple command from the command-line. Another advantage of the two-server system is that, since users need only log into the staging server, security risks on the live server are reduced.
Most of the virtual hosts mentioned in the "live server" section also have their equivalent staging hostnames.