I’m new to servers and Linux in general so pardon me if this is a stupid question.

I’ve been trying to host multiple Wordpress installations on a single droplet. Specifically, I want to host multiple sub-domains. Such as, www.example.com and blog.example.com. I own the domain, and I have setup A records in the DigitalOcean DNS for each of the subdomains.

Apparently Apache Virtual Hosts should let me set up multiple websites on a single server. I followed the DigitalOcean guides on setting up the Virtual Hosts to the letter, but I keep running into a certain error. That is, after I install the virtual hosts, the permalinks don’t seem to work. The website works fine as long as I keep the permalinks in the default format. But the moment I try to change to a custom permalink structure, the whole Wordpress breaks. I can still login, but all posts throw a 404 error. I’m also unable to ‘hide backend’ by changing the URL of the /wp-admin page.

I have checked the .htaccess file as well as the Apache sites-enabled/example.com.conf files to make sure everything is correct. I’m 90% sure I did this right. But I might have missed something.

I’ve attempted to setup the server twice now using the Wordpress One-click installation. I’ve attempted it again, starting from Ubuntu 18.04 and manually installing the LAMP stack, but I ran into the exact same issue. I can’t provide a website link right now because I wiped the server and did without the Virtual Hosts for now, so my website is working (albeit without any subdomains). But if it’s needed I can open a new Droplet and replicate the issue.

If anyone has any idea what is going on, I would love some help. Thanks!

TL;DR - Tried to set up Apache Virtual Hosts for subdomains, but the permalinks don’t work.