Multiple domains on your vCluster

By Joe Gardiner Tuesday, 2nd March 2010

Your vCluster can be used to host multiple domains if you subscribe to the Standard package. This guide will show you how…

What you will need…

An FTP client, we like FileZilla. It is cross platform and free!

A text editor. Notepad or TextEdit will both be fine.

A web browser. We like Firefox.

A text file with all the access settings from your vCluster page. This will include the access server address (e.g. access1.c1.catn.com), your private IP, your access username, (same as your vCluster name) and your access password, (this can be changed in the settings screen). Note: For security reasons, you should delete this text file after use.

Getting Started…

The first step is to connect to the access server and create a directory for the new domain. In this tutorial I will be using FileZilla. Fire up your FTP client, and have a look at the connection input boxes. We are going to enter the required server information that we copied into the text file at the start of this tutorial.

In the “Host” field enter the access server name. In the example you can see I have used “access1.c1.catn.com”.

In the “Username” field enter the username you copied. (This will be the same as your vCluster name).

In the “Password” field enter the password you copied in. You can change this password at anytime through the Database Settings section of the Control Panel.

You can leave the “Port” field empty, as FileZilla will use the default, 21.

Once you’ve completed the fields click Quick Connect to connect to the server.

Once FileZilla connects to the access server, the folder tree will be displayed.

We will be creating our domain directory inside the vhosts folder. The full path you need to navigate to is: /sites/vclustername/vhosts .

Create a new dirctory inside the vhosts folder by right clicking on vhosts, and selecting “Create Directory”

In order for the new sub-domain to be recognised by the DNS, the folder name much match the domain name you have purchased. For example, my domain name is joegardiner.co.uk, so in order to successfully create a new sub-domain I will name the directory joegardiner.co.uk. This naming convention is vital in order to successfully create multiple domains on your vCluster.

Do this now for your new sub-domain. For the purposes of this tutorial I will create a new domain called “joegardiner.co.uk”.

This newly created sub-domain can now have any php app, framework, or CMS uploaded to it. See my other help guides for installing various CMS’s.

To clarify: the domain name you purchase e.g. www.mydomain.co.uk, should be in your sub-domain folder name, for example…

/sites/joegardiner/vhosts/joegardiner.co.uk

Finally in order to enable dynamic content on this new sub-domain, we need to create a “.craccess” file. On you local machine, start up your preferred text editor, and copy and paste the code from below into a new page.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !.(gif|jpe?g|png|css|js|ico)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://YOUR PRIVATE IP/$1 [P,L]

Replace the text “YOUR PRIVATE IP”, with the private IP address given on the vCluster settings page of the CatN Control Panel.

Save this file as “.craccess”, somewhere you can reach it easily, like your Desktop. We need to upload this file to the route of your sub-domain.In order to do this we need to enable viewing hidden files in FileZilla. This is a simple fix, in version 3.x click on server, then select “Force showing hidden files”.

Now using FileZilla we can find the newly created .craccess file and drag it across into the sub-domain root we created.

Once the file is uploaded make sure that the text editor you used hasn’t added any file extensions to the .craccess file you created, such as .txt or .rtf. If they did, simply right click on the file and select rename to remove the extension.