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VPS DNS question

fsd

Active Member
Hello
So I am going to buy a VPS soon and although I've been managing websites for years I am new to the world of VPS and dedicated servers.

So when I buy the VPS I get an ip address and to use my own domain I make an A record pointing to the ip address. I asume thats all I need to get the domain working,

but what about adding more domains? Do I need another IP for each domain added? Or do I use the same IP and somehow make it point to a different directory on the server?


Not sure where this topic belongs

And thanks for your time
 
For normal http access, multiple domains can use the same IP as long as they have valid A-records so clients can find them.

https using a SSL certificate only allows one site per IP, to have multiple sites supporting https you need an IP for each one.

Other services usually go by IP and port as well- for instance an IRCd running on one IP will always answer requests to that IP and port regardless of what DNS lookups were performed to direct clients to it. These may need separate IPs if you have to have multiple instances, although you can run more than one by putting the different instances on different ports.
 
Sure you can use a single IP to host more than one site (as long as you won't need ssl, if that is the case each secure site would require its own IP). You might want to consider getting a managed VPS with a control panel like Cpanel/WHM, it will cost a bit more but will probably save you time and money with your VPS administration.
 
Which control panel are you trying to use? In Plesk and cPanel, you can configure single IP. And then you can use that single shared IP with multiple domains.
 
fsd, what you want to set up on your VPS is something called Virtual Host in Apache - and you can have multiple domains pointing to the same IP address, and pointing to different directories in the same server.
How exactly this is to be done depends on whether or not you use a Control Panel (e.g. Direct Admin, CPanel, Kloxo, Webmin etc) or not (possible but may be slightly more complex).
 
Basically you can add multiple website on shared IP of the server. If you have purchased vps with the control panel like cpanel or plesk then you can easily add multiple sites through it.
 
Hi fsd,

You do not need a unique IP address PER domain name.

Basically, the Domain Naming System is used for the translation of Names to Numbers (text book quote, sorry) this means you type in google.com, and your browser looks up the domain name, locates the IP Address, and sends the data to said IP Address. It's a matter of setting up your web server with the relevant domain name (host / virtualhost [apache])
 
Yes i agree with sarmth for multiple domains single ips can be used,
from cpanel you an configure your other domains you can add them as addon domain and point them to your main domain
since your main domain is dedicated ip and all other domain will be point to the one dedicated ip.
 
Hi

Of course you can add multiple domain names for a single IP address :) With Apache Virtual Hosts you could run several websites with one IP and also customize your settings for each domain.
 
I use VestaCP for a panel to manage my VPS. Very easy to install. It's free and is supported by an actively supported forum (by the Admin of VestaCP) as well as a huge collection of documentation. VestaCP works with a combo of Nginx and Apache, Nginx making it very light in use of resources so one can even use it with a 512 MB RAM VPS. I started to use VestaCP in 2014 when it was still in its infancy, and have seen it developing to something that is very easy to manage. It has had the odd security scare, which in my opinion is good, as it usually tests the security of the panel and one learns how to harden it more. If you check VestaCP it has a very easy way to generate an installation command. I don't use mail and FTP (prefer to use SFTP and Zoho Mail) as that is my way of hardening security. Those two are usually the areas where hacking is more likely to occur.
https://vestacp.com/install/

Once you have it up and running it works almost like cPanel. You can add on users, create packages, add on domains, create databases.

If you need some basic info on a beginner level of how to get into a Linux VPS you can look at my notes here:
http://dhwebs.net/
 
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