Multisite or not to multisite

  • Greetings,

    I have VPS with several Domains and I initially thought I would be able to easily get WordPress to tie in to several of those domains.

    Problem is I want to be able to use WordPress anyway I want, for a root domain, or as a sub directory.

    I have enabled MultiSite, but it appears that only gives me the ability to install in subdomains. What I need is to support Multi-Domain. “Multi-Domain” from what I can tell is not natively supported and requires plugins, and yada yada yada…. This makes me believe MultiSite may not be for me. Plugins are the kind of things that fail when doing upgrades as is proof as the necessary plugins are not supported in 3.8 yet?

    So this got me thinking, what is the actual advantage of having a single instance for all my domains. Best as I can tell WordPress itself puts very little load on the server and occupies very little disk space.

    If I run 15 low usage domains on my VPS and want to stand up 10 WordPress instances what are the pitfalls I could run into. Best as I can tell there would be no problem as I would just need to set up a new Database for each WordPress Instance. and 25 megs of Space for the actual WordPress Installation but as far as server resources or actual load on the server I shouldn’t run into any problems.

    so in summary I am looking to set up WordPress for my domains
    https://www.apples.com
    https://www.oranges.com
    https://www.carrots.com
    ….

    these sites have nothing to do with each other. They don’t share any content between them.

    I want to set WordPress to be the root Content Manager for apples.com but for oranges.com I want to setup https://www.oranges.com/blog for my WordPress installation.

    Thank you for your help in sorting this out for me!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Hi there,

    If the sites have nothing to do with each other then it probably doesn’t make much sense to make it a multisite. A multisite network only has one wp-content folder which means all the sites on the network share the same plugins and themes. You could set up a domain mapping plugin to map your domains to the subsites, but in my opinion, separate installations of WordPress would make more sense. If the sites are going to be managed differently and have no relation, then it’s probably better to go with just separate installations.

    To make orange.com/blog your WordPress installation then simply place a folder via FTP inside your orange.com folder. So if all of these domains are on one VPS, then it would be something like public_html/oranges.com/blog … And then just go through the normal WordPress installation process.

    Hope this helps..

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    The one exception to ‘Sites have nothing in common, don’t use Multisite’ is if they’re all your sites. That is, I have my personal blog, my photo blog, my tech blog, my ’embarass my brother’ blog, all on one network, because it’s all me posting on separate sites. But then again, that IS something in common ?? Me.

    Also keep in mind if you ever want to move one site off the network, it’s a PITA.

    That’s a great point Mika. If it’s all one person managing the sites, then multisite can definitely be useful.

    Thread Starter brittonv

    (@brittonv)

    I never went anywhere with this but am getting ready to kick it up again.

    Are there any differences in opinions in the 4.0 release?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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