This tutorial is intended for developers who: 1) Are creating a cake app that needs to scale 2) Use apache and have access to modify their apache config Using apache .htaccess files is a huge performance hit - and should be avoided at all costs. The tutorial below will show you how to get "pretty url" features of cake, while not having to use .htaccess to do so. The first half of the article will explain how to get rid of .htaccess, while the second half will tie it into a more complex (but real world) example of how you can leverage this while using 1 apache config to serve multiple subdomains.