Go from single virtualhost w/Wordpress to multiple virtual hosts w/Wordpress

Posted on March 17, 2021

D.O. seems to have a lot of great tutorials for setting up webservers for multi-domain apache2/WordPress setups, but **none **for going from single domain to multi-domain.

I’m using one of the WordPress droplets to run my website currently. I recently purchased two domains that I will be using for pilot projects, and if they catch on, I’ll probably give each it’s own dedicated server at some point in the future.

At the moment, what I would like to do is take my current set-up, and modify it so that it will run a total of three websites. Ideally, each would be isolated from the others. Ideally, each would have its own WordPress instance to keep admins off of each other’s websites.

I’m trying to figure out how to do this without breaking my existing website. Since none of these are for business, I don’t mind downtime. They website could be down for a whole day - no big deal. I just don’t want to have to rebuild my entire existing website.

Any advice is appreciated!

Thanks!!!

–Tony

This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Bobby Iliev

April 3, 2021

Accepted Answer

Hi there,

You could follow the steps from this video on how to host multiple WordPress websites on the same server with Apache Virtual Hosts:

Essentially, what needs to happen is:

Download a new copy of WordPress with the wget command:

wget wordpress.org/latest.zip

After that extract the files

unzip latest.zip

Then move the files to the /var/www/ folder:

mv wordpress /var/www/your_site.com

Then set the owner of the file to the Apache2 user:

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/your_site.com

After that copy the existing Apache config:

sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/your_site.conf

Then enable the new site:

sudo a2ensite

Run a configtest:

sudo apachectl -t

If you get Syntax OK reload Apache:

sudo systemctl reload apache2

Then create a new MySQL database and username. To create the database first access MySQL:

mysql

Then run the following queries:

CREATE DATABASE wp_site;

CREATE USER 'wp_site'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'use_secure_password_here';

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wp_site.* TO 'wp_site'@'%' WITH GREANT OPTION;