I’m almost embarrassed to talk about this one, but I had a hard time figuring it out, so perhaps somebody could possibly be helped by my screwup.

In the process of tracking down some other problem on a client’s website, I was looking at apache status displays, and noted that I’d never set this site up with a “default” virtual host. The first virtual host described is the default one, which receives any inputs that don’t match any other virtual host – which automatically includes, for example, requests directed at an ip address. So I implemented a default virtual host. That isn’t important.

What is important is that in doing so I allowed the other virtual hosts to fall into their default order, which is to say directory order, which is to say alphabetical order.