Solved: Multiple Domains with WordPress on One Server

WordPress has a feature called MultiSite, which is often confused for “multiple websites (domains)”, but is in fact “multiple sub-domains”. Although many people look forward to have multiple websites (with different domains) with wordpress to install on single server, but there is no simple solution from WordPress yet.

This post will help you in configuring multiple domains using wordpress on single server. We will be using Linux server (Ubuntu) with Apache 2.2 and wordpress 3.5.1 for our example. You can use the same idea for different OS and IIS (or other web server).

NOTE: Backup your wordpress directory, wordpress database and web server files and directories before continuing with the steps mentioned below.

After installation, wordpress uses all its files (mostly php) for single domain. So we will need to have multiple wordpress installation, each per domain (website). Installation of wordpress in Linux is just downloading the latest.tar.gz file from wordpress.org and extracting them in the desired directory (the root for your website), and then configuring your DB (for each wordpress website) and finally few lines in wp-config.php (for each wordpress website) according to the DB you just configured. Just follow these steps for installation of single wordpress for Ubuntu 12.04 from digitalocean.com. Repeat the steps each time for multiple domains as explained below. You may want to check steps for your OS from Google.

Let’s say you have three domains to be configured with wordpress in single server. You should have different root directories for all these three websites. For eg.

Domain	Root Directory
abc.com	/mnt/abc/
pqr.com	/mnt/pqr/
xyz.com	/mnt/xyz/

The trick is to redirect to individual website through the webserver (apache/iis) using “Virtual Hosts”. Depending on your version of Apache, you can configure virtual hosts in appropriate file. In Ubuntu 12.04, Apache 2.2 onwards, Virtual Hosts can be configured in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/filename as follows:

<VirtualHost *:80>     DocumentRoot /www/abc     ServerName abc.com     ServerAlias www.abc.com ftp.abc.com mail.abc.com     # Other directives here </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost *:80>     DocumentRoot /www/pqr     ServerName pqr.com     ServerAlias www.pqr.com ftp.pqr.com mail.pqr.com     # Other directives here </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost *:80>     DocumentRoot /www/xyz     ServerName xyz.com     ServerAlias www.xyz.com ftp.xyz.com mail.xyz.com     # Other directives here </VirtualHost>

Note: Restart your Apache service after configuring virtual hosts.

You can check for more examples on virtual hosts on apache here.

Now your Apache will redirect the request for appropriate website to its corresponding root directory. And from there, wordpress for that website will take control as if it was the only wordpress on that server.

Advantages: 

• You can have multiple (as much as you want) domains (websites) with wordpress on single server.
• All the wordpress for all websites are completely independent of each others.
• All the individual wordpress sites (domains) can work with single IP address.

Disadvantage:

• All the domains (websites) will have separate management, dashboard, etc. There is no single dashboard from where you can manage all your websites. This can only be done by WordPress in upcoming versions.