Thread

I have a client that is looking to have 3 or 4 sites developed, each with their own domain. There will be some shared templates and a small amount of shared content, which leads me to think that using MSM will be useful here, not least because of the savings on EE licenses for the client and the convenience of them being able to manage all the sites through a single admin login.

So far, so good. 😊

I currently have a hosting account with TSOHost (http://tsohost.com/) in the UK on their Cloud Hosting platform and I have been investigating whether or not they support EE with the MSM. Their own website runs on EE and the claim they support EE on their site. However, after a lengthy email conversation with their support, it seems that they can’t support the MSM on the Cloud Hosting platform in a practical way.

Although I have developed several sites in EE, I have never used the MSM so please bear with me as I try and explain how I think it works.

From my reading of the MSM docs, (specifically this page: http://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/cp/sites/domainsetup.html), it appears to me that each site running under the MSM needs it’s own public_html root folder.

TSO claim that the supported way of running multiple sites under one installation requires what they call setting up domain aliases. The problem comes is that all of these domain aliases point to a single public_html folder.

TSO have advised me that the way to get around this would be to create separate folders under public_html for each of the sites to be hosted, then use .htaccess rewrite rules to re-direct requests for each site to their respective folders, like this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain1.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /domain1.com/$1

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain2.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /domain2.com/$1

Is it just me, or would this result in URLs for each site that look like this:

http://domain1.com/domain1.com/some/page

http://domain2.com/domain2.com/some/page

Because that seems ridiculous to me.

Can anyone advise as to whether or not this would work and is, indeed a good idea, because I seem to be going round in circles on this at the moment.

Also, Am I right in my reading of the MSM docs that I do, in fact, need a separate public_html folder for each site running under MSM?

MSM requires that all sites live under the same hosting account, or the same /public_html folder (or equivilent)

So a typical folder structure may be

/public_html/index.php (base install site)
/public_html/images
/public_html/system
/public_html/themes
/public_html/mydomain2folder (addon domain)
/public_html/mydomain2folder/index.php
/public_html/mydomain3folder (addon domain)
/public_html/mydomain3folder/index.php
/public_html/mydomain4folder (addon domain)
/public_html/mydomain5folder/index.php

If you use Cpanel then when you add “Addon domains” to the account this is how it organises folder structure ( you could also use Subdomains as well sinbce the structure for them is the same).

With an Addon domain, the actualy domain is mapped to the appropriate folder, so the URl would behave as you expect it to, eg mydomain2.co.uk and not domain1.co.uk/mydomain2folder

Thanks Rob, that’s really helpful, much clearer than the official docs!