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Hosting questions

I’ve been a member for about a year.

I want to move my sites to WPMUDEV hosting. Currently with SiteGround.

Current architecture: 1 Multisite (example: mysite.com) w/6 testing subsites (testsite1.mysite.com, etc.) and 7 active subsites (activesite1.com, etc.) Active subsites are parked via cPanel and pointed to main site w/no redirects. Plus 3 Addon Domains each with their own WP installs. Plus several redirects to active multisite subsites and Addon domains.

How do I determine what WPMUDEV plan(s) I need? Possibly pay for a Gold plan for my multisite and then use the 3 free Bronze plans w/my current membership for the separate WP installs? Then buy additional Bronze (or other) plans as I need them for future Addon Domains with independent WP installs. (This would cost me $49 for my membership and $50 for the Gold plan on a monthly basis?)

Do I get cPanel w/WMPUDEV? How do I manage Parked Domains? Addon Domains? Redirects? SSL? Emails? FTP? SQL?

I currently use WP Rocket to manage caching w/Cloudflare CDN integration. Do your tools completely replace them or work in conjunction? What would I do? FYI: I use CloudFlare Proxy to hide IP’s for 2 active, multisite subsites.

Currently, only my multisite shows up in the WPMUDEV My Websites dashboard. Do I need to add my active multisite subsites so they show up there and get their own WPMUDEV, WordPress dashboard item? I don’t see how to manage the subsites independently from the multisite via the WMPUDEV My Websites dashboard. Do I need to add my Addon Domains which have their own WordPress installs to the My Websites dashboard?

Thanks,
~Bob

Tue, 5 May 2020 15:41:38
  • Adam
    • Support Gorilla

    Hi BWeb

    I hope you’re well today and thank you for your question!

    Before I’ll answer your questions, let me sum up some “terminology” that I’ll use so we’d be on the same side :slight_smile:

    – “site” – by “site” I’ll refer to one WP installation, regardless whether it’s a standard “single WP” or a “multisite WP” installation (and if “Multisite WP” – regardless of how many sub-sites it has)

    – “main site” and “sub-site” – a site that’s a part of the “Multisite” WP installation

    – “plan” or “server” – is a single instance of a hosting plan on WPMU DEV hosting

    1) That said, let me first refer to your current infrastructure and how it relates to WPMU DEV hosting.

    Each plan at WPMU DEV Hosting can only host one site. There’s no limit on the number of domains, though. If I correctly understand your current situation, you will need:

    – one plan where you’ll set your Mulisite
    – three plans where you set one single WP on each.

    This is not related to domains (see below) but to WordPress installations.

    2)

    How do I determine what WPMUDEV plan(s) I need?

    As for “structure”, see point 1 above :slight_smile:

    As for “bronze” vs “Gold” and so on – that’s a bit different thing. Standard WP as well as Multisite can be set on any plan and whether “bronze” will suffice or you’ll need higher one, it depends mostly on:

    – how big is the site in terms of storage space that it needs (it must “fit in” within the available storage space, preferably with a significant margin)

    – how complex the site is in terms of configuration (more or less plugins, more “resource heavy” plugins etc)

    – how much traffic it gets

    This isn’t something that would be easy to “asses”. However, you can always start with the “lowest” plan that provides enough storage space for the site and see how the site behaves. If it performs well, you could stick to the plan. If it turns out it needs more resource, you can upgrade to higher plan.

    3. Domains

    There’s no such thing here as “Addon” or “Parked” domains. You can add as many domains to the “plan” as you want but only one can be set as “Primary”. To add domains to site you need to edit DNS (though you can also use our DNS now) and point domain’s A and/or AAAA and/or CNAME records to given IP/host. You’ll get that information for each site once the site is already set up at our hosting.

    4.

    Do I get cPanel w/WMPUDEV? Redirects? SSL? Emails? FTP? SQL?

    There is no cPanel. You do have access to all necessary tools/options via “Hosting” section of The Hub. You can add domains there, create/manage SFTP/SSH accounts too, check logs and some server stats and so on.

    There’s no “redirects” though. Most redirects can be set using plugins in WordPress and if there’s something that cannot or requires some “special treatment” please feel free to tell us and our devops/sysadmins are always ready to help – if it’s technically possible.

    From the “Hosting” section (once you got your sites set up) you’ll also have access to Email configuration – so you can either set e-mail forwarding or create up to 5 e-mail accounts for each site. There’s also phpMyAdmin available to let you access DB directly.

    5.

    I currently use WP Rocket to manage caching w/Cloudflare CDN integration. Do your tools completely replace them or work in conjunction? What would I do? FYI: I use CloudFlare Proxy to hide IP’s for 2 active, multisite subsites.

    While WP Rocket is a decent plugin I’d advise against it for sites hosted with us. Instead, I’d recommend our own Hummingbird. It provides Page Cache and various site optimization options and it also provides integration with CloudFlare so it can manage CF cache.

    Using CloudFlare with our hosting is perfectly fine and we often recommend it too.

    Currently, only my multisite shows up in the WPMUDEV My Websites dashboard. Do I need to add my active multisite subsites so they show up there and get their own WPMUDEV, WordPress dashboard item? I don’t see how to manage the subsites independently from the multisite via the WMPUDEV My Websites dashboard. Do I need to add my Addon Domains which have their own WordPress installs to the My Websites dashboard?

    A multisite installation, regardless of how many sub-sites it contains, is still just one WordPress installation. It will always be visible in “My websites” as one site.

    For all separate installations you need to have WPMU DEV Dashbaord installed on them to get them connected to The Hub. Note please: even if you have multiple domains pointing and/or redirected to the same site, it will always show just one domain, the one that’s configured in WP “Settings”.

    Having said that, I tried to address all your concerns and I hope I was able to help at least a bit but if something’s still unclear or you have any follow-up/additional questions, please don’t hesitate to ask and I’ll be happy to assist you.

    Please also take a look at these docs:

    https://wpmudev.com/docs/hosting/overview/

    Best regards,
    Adam

  • BWeb
    • Flash Drive

    Thanks for your quick and detailed response Adam. Here are some follow-up questions:

    If I understand correctly, Addon Domains as utilized by cPanel are unnecessary because with WPMU DEV I’d have a Plan for each WordPress installation, each having its own IP address. (Probably a Gold Plan for my Multisite and Bronze plans for each single site installation.) I’d just handle routing thru DNS A Records. Correct?

    My Multisite, (Ex: mysite.com) includes active subsites (Ex: subsite1.com, subsite2.com, etc) and testing subsites (Ex: testsite1.mysite.com, testsite2.mysite.com, etc).

    Currently to make the testing subsites accessible I do nothing at DNS level because the URL’s are direct subsites of the main site (testsite1.mysite.com) and already point to the main site IP inherently. But I have to use cPanel to create Subsites of the complete subsite URL (testsite1.mysite.com) with no redirect, which instructs the server to route the calls to the main site, wherein WordPress manages final routing to the proper testing subsite. How do I instruct your servers to accept and direct the testing subsite URL’s to the main site so WordPress can handle final routing? (Once the testing site gets approved I map it to its final, active subsite URL from WordPress. See active subsite next paragraph.)

    Currently to make the active subsites accessible I point the active subsite URL’s A Record to the main site IP, then Park the subsite URL via cPanel with no redirect, which instructs the server to route the calls to the main site, wherein WordPress manages final routing to the proper active subsite. How do I instruct your servers to accept and direct these active subsite URL’s to the main site so WordPress can handle final routing?

    I’m overthinking Redirects. I’d just use Domain Forwarding at DNS level.

    SSL, FTP, SQL… I understand the WPMU DEV Hub>Hosting Dashboard provides control of these.

    Email… I only need email for the multisite main site (the email I use). It currently resides with SiteGround. I’m guessing I can just import it all to WPMU DEV so I don’t lose anything? Do you have an article which includes setup instructions? All other emails currently reside at the Domain Names’ registrars or O365. I’d use your DNS for the multisite main site, but only A Records for all other subsites and WPMU DEV plans.

    WP Rocket, CloudFlare, Hummingbird… Understood.

    I understand that only URL’s with their own Plans get added to the Hub>Sites, and not the subsite URL’s of the multisite. When I visit my multisite at the Hub>Sites>mysite.com>Plugins & Themes it shows a list of active and inactive plugins. Only plugins active on mysite.com show as active. Plugins active on subsites are shown as inactive. Is there any way to view from the Hub whether a plugin is active or inactive on a subsite? Is there any way to activate/deactivate plugins on a subsite level or only on a network activate level?

    Lastly, can I have a Plan with no website/URL associated with it and access it from a browser? For example: I want to create a site with its own Plan and I want to allow my customer to watch construction progress but not point a URL to it until it’s approved. Is there a way to do this or would I create it as a subsite of my multisite for testing purposes then migrate it to its own Plan when ready?

    Thanks so much for your time and expertise Adam,
    ~Bob

  • Predrag Dubajic
    • Support

    Hi BWeb ,

    If I understand correctly, Addon Domains as utilized by cPanel are unnecessary because with WPMU DEV I’d have a Plan for each WordPress installation, each having its own IP address. (Probably a Gold Plan for my Multisite and Bronze plans for each single site installation.) I’d just handle routing thru DNS A Records. Correct?

    That is correct, each installation is a separate instance with its own IP, so you would setup your DNS to point to those IPs and add the domain in the Hosting panel, once the DNS changes propagate you can set it as a primary domain from there.
    You can read more about DNS settings here:
    https://wpmudev.com/docs/hosting/dns-and-domain-management/

    My Multisite, (Ex: mysite.com) includes active subsites (Ex: subsite1.com, subsite2.com, etc) and testing subsites (Ex: testsite1.mysite.com, testsite2.mysite.com, etc).

    When using subdomain multisite all of your subsites have a subdomain, meaning that subsite1.com is a mapped domain for subsite1.mysite.com, these are created automatically by WP and there are no separate installations for either testsite1.mysite.com or subsite1.mysite.com.
    On our hosting we currently require SSL wildcard certificate to be provided to us which our hosting team would then apply to your site, you can read more about this here:
    https://wpmudev.com/docs/hosting/dns-and-domain-management/#ssl-tsl-https

    Note: We’re currently working on adding support for free SSL wildcards so that the above steps wouldn’t be required for subdomain installations in the future, and we’re hoping to have that ready soon.

    Currently to make the active subsites accessible I point the active subsite URL’s A Record to the main site IP, then Park the subsite URL via cPanel with no redirect, which instructs the server to route the calls to the main site, wherein WordPress manages final routing to the proper active subsite. How do I instruct your servers to accept and direct these active subsite URL’s to the main site so WordPress can handle final routing?

    I’m overthinking Redirects. I’d just use Domain Forwarding at DNS level.

    Basically, what you need to do is to point all of your custom domains to our hosting, so mysite.com, subsite1.com, subsite1.com and add it to our hosting panel.
    Once that is done you would set mysite.com as your primary domain and that will be used by your main site.
    What’s left after that is to configure domain mapping for your subsites, once you have that set up WP will handle redirects and open subsites with their mapped domain, you can read more about WP native domain mapping here:
    https://wordpress.org/support/article/wordpress-multisite-domain-mapping/

    SSL, FTP, SQL… I understand the WPMU DEV Hub>Hosting Dashboard provides control of these.

    You get an option to create SFTP and/or SSH accounts and you have access to phpMyAdmin from the hosting panel, as for the SSL, free Let’s Encrypt SSL cert is applied for single installations and mapped domains but as I mentioned above the wildcard SSL certificate is something currently being worked on.

    Email… I only need email for the multisite main site (the email I use). It currently resides with SiteGround. I’m guessing I can just import it all to WPMU DEV so I don’t lose anything? Do you have an article which includes setup instructions? All other emails currently reside at the Domain Names’ registrars or O365. I’d use your DNS for the multisite main site, but only A Records for all other subsites and WPMU DEV plans.

    You can read more about email setup on the docs page here:
    https://wpmudev.com/docs/hosting/emails/
    At the moment there’s no option to import existing emails from the account, it will start with an empty inbox.
    So you should download and store a backup, exporting a backup of your existing email depends on the email hosting and email client that you currently use.

    I understand that only URL’s with their own Plans get added to the Hub>Sites, and not the subsite URL’s of the multisite. When I visit my multisite at the Hub>Sites>mysite.com>Plugins & Themes it shows a list of active and inactive plugins. Only plugins active on mysite.com show as active. Plugins active on subsites are shown as inactive. Is there any way to view from the Hub whether a plugin is active or inactive on a subsite? Is there any way to activate/deactivate plugins on a subsite level or only on a network activate level?

    That is correct, Hub only shows the main domain since network installation is still one installation, each subsite will use same files of the plugins, so you can’t, for example, update a plugin on subsite1.com but leave that same plugin running an older version on subsite2.com.
    There’s currently no option to handle active/inactive plugins for subsites from Hub.

    Lastly, can I have a Plan with no website/URL associated with it and access it from a browser? For example: I want to create a site with its own Plan and I want to allow my customer to watch construction progress but not point a URL to it until it’s approved. Is there a way to do this or would I create it as a subsite of my multisite for testing purposes then migrate it to its own Plan when ready?

    Each site created on our hosting is accessible even without the custom domain, when you create new installation you choose the site ID and that used for the domain, so you could always access it via yoursiteid.wpmudev.host.
    Keep in mind that free sites (ones created with hosting credit) expire after 21 days if there’s no activity in Hosting Hub, you can read more about that here:
    https://wpmudev.com/docs/hosting/overview/#about-free-sites
    Basically, each visit to Hosting Hub resets the timer back to 21 days again and prevents it from being archived, and there’s also email notification being sent when site is getting close to being archived.
    In addition to that, you can restore your archived site for 30 days after it has been archived, by using the hosting backups.

    Hope this helps :slight_smile:

    Best regards,
    Predrag