12 Tips for Multiple Self Hosted WordPress Sites on one Server.

In this article I go over 12 considerations for setting up multiple sites running WordPress, on a single self hosted server. I look at what kinds of hosting options you have and how you can reduce your monthly costs to less than $1 per site. Briefly I cover the architecture needed to support multiple domains, without being nickle and dimed to death. Then I look at how to protect yourself against attack, shutdowns by your host and expensive bandwidth costs.

1. Overall System Design for multiple self hosted WordPress sites.
When I began my blogging adventure the first problem I wanted to solve was, "How do I spawn lots of different WordPress sites, quickly and easily, without spending a whole lot of money?". And by that I mean, next to nothing but my time and energy. But I also had another Legacy Software problem. I was running 3 servers at the time, and wanted to consolidate, to save money, so I was going to have to support several different versions of PHP and Mysql.

I had a total of 32 sites that needed a home, with many different types of apps and software.

The goal was to be able to spawn as many sites as I could imagine, surely that's a good thing, right?

How much time does it take?
Starting from scratch with a little prior experience and barely a clue about the new tech. It took about 2 weeks and 4 hours per day, to get up to speed. So maybe 80-100 hours setup time. You might do it quicker, but I had to set up 32 live sites and make sure their plugins and server features were all working.

So here's how I solved the hosting problem.
The ultimate solution for me was to use Docker with Nginx-Proxy on the front end. With the right container setup you can mimic any environment. But more importantly I could consolidate multiple databases and architectures into a single machine. This allowed 2 versions of PHP and 2 versions of Mysql to co-exist. That allowed older WordPress sites to reside with newer wordpress sites, so I could upgrade them when I had the time to.

So this is a general map of how I handled the problem.

The main server is a collection of docker containers which hold.

•  Nginx-proxy
• 2 Flavors of PHP
  - PHP 5.2
  - PHP 7.4
• 3 mysql Databases
  - 1 x mysql5.5
  - 2 x mysql5.7
• 32 domains
  - multiple WordPress sites
  - several legacy PHP sites
  - several other types of apps

On the main host are several utilities for managing 

• SSL renewal automation
• Automated New Site Creation
• Anonymous proxy
• Auto backups
• Firewall
• DDOS and exploit protection
• Updating and maintenance

Advantages of this set up
These tools and scripts give us the ability to spin up new WordPress sites in a matter of seconds, including all the SSL cert setups, and database setup, Apache, Docker and Nginx setups.

Offsite, there are bandwidth reduction strategies like Cloudflare proxying

We reserve the option to move the databases off server.

I moved the mail server off to another machine. So I'll talk about that elsewhere.
We use a combination of Amazon SES, a private mail server and Google Gmail to reduce auto-responder expenses to about $5 per month + 10c per 1000 emails. Google provides spam filtering, while Amazon provides cost effective bulk mailing to lists.

2. Minimum Hardware Requirements as related to price.
Docker requires at least a 4GB system, and when you're dealing with virtual hosts, the 4GB, 2CPU, 80GB SSD with about 3TB-4TB of bandwidth is a standard for $20 per month.

That's good for up to about 100k visitors per day (3 million per month), PROVIDED you can keep your average page load under 1mb per page. To do that, we can employ the help of FREE Cloudflare proxying, and keep auto streaming videos OFF our landing pages.

The mail server only needed a $5 server with 1GB Ram and 1 vCPU. Just make sure you get your swap file setup, because they're not always present on a virtual host. If you dont have a good swap file setup, you can easily crash when you run out of memory.

3. What type of Self Hosting should I use, Shared, Virtual, Dedicated?
Dedicated  Hosting Services
So by Dedicated I mean a physical bare metal server machine sitting in a facility somewhere with disk drives and all your hardware in a box. Then there's virtual, on cloud infrastructure hardware of many flavors. In both cases you can have shared resources or private, dedicated is more commonly private.

Shared Hosting Services
With shared services you're going to have hundreds if not thousands of other people taking up resources on that server with you. It only takes one clueless person and you're all in trouble. You can get by here, but you can very easily be disappointed.

Private Hosting services
are going to give you less headaches if you should have any kind of success or if you are developing and experimenting. Shared resources are going to be much cheaper, but if you do anything that resembles the stress of success, you're going to be strangled and squashed and forced to upgrade.

Virtual Hosting Services
Now I chose to start with Virtual hosting, again because I'm just not big enough yet. It gets down to how much traffic you think you'll be throwing at your sites, and that's because of the potential for bandwidth overage to run your bills up. Most virtual hosting services give you a quota, and then charge around 1c per GB on overage,  Heads up though with Amazon AWS, they will charge you 9c per GB so that could get insane. This I found out, AFTER I had everything set up on AWS.. oh dear :(. So if you are on Amazon, you are going to have to keep your finger on the pulse of that one.

At $20 per month, does it even matter which hosting company?
What I concluded after days of research was that if price was the issue, then it didn't really matter who I went with. Even with 32 sites, I just wasn't going to be big enough at first to have to worry about problems of scale. That's because my daily traffic was still under 3000 visitors per day and the price and performance of 4GB virtual machines, are all about the same.  That's about $20/month. Any cheaper and there would be business affecting trade offs for sure.

So for these reasons I chose to start and stay with Amazon AWS on Lightsail, even though I think all the other virtual hosts are a little more competitive.
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5. Does server Location matter? Where should I host? 
So you want fast load times and fast responses. An important part of that is distance that your electrical signals travel through the internet to your actual customer. This often gives the measurement of round ping times, a measure of latency between your server and a client location. From USA to USA this is often under 50ms, but USA to Australia or Asia or even Europe and you can have 250ms round trips or worse. Basically for those who want fast responsive websites, every millisecond counts. 

Cloudflare to the rescue again.
Cloudflare is a DNS service, with some extra features, like proxy and cache. This can be great for hiding your IP and lowering your bandwidth. But they can also give you a distributed edge by serving your Euro or Asian content from servers in USA to US residents. This can give you the advantage of low cost offshore hosting, with a US presence. Does it actually work like that? I'm not sure actually, but that's the idea. Best thing is, the price is free and the DNS servers are very fast and easy to deal with.

Cloudflare simplifies SSL certification registration and renewal.
Cloudflare also have some very easy to set up SSL scripts that work with letsencrypt, so you can automate your certificate renewal. I was able to set these up in minutes and create a simple script to place my keys and certs where nginx-proxy can handle them.

My location consideration example...
I wanted to target US markets, so really I want a server in the middle of USA, maybe Dallas, possibly Phoenix, but I don't really want to be stuck in a corner of the country, Miami, LA, NY, Seattle, Chicago. All along the top of USA is very congested, and the corners just have terrible ping times. The big data centers however, they go where the electricity is cheap, like along the Columbia River in Oregon where they have wind and water turbines. But from this location you're kind of far away from EVERYONE. So ping and round trip latency wont be the best. But it's cheap!

6. What bandwidth requirements do I have, should I worry about overage?
Now I started to worry about bandwidth,  so went into my logs and records and found that because I wasn't streaming videos or mpgs or big files, and just serving images and static pages, plus I cached pages through Cloudflare, I didn't even burn .05TB (terrabyte) per month.

If your average page load is about 1mb, you're going to burn 1GB per 1000 visitors and 1TB per million visitors and with the average plans we're going to consider we will have 3TB-4TB up our sleeves. 

What does all that mean? Well, if you can keep your average page load under 1mb, then you're good for up to around 100,000 visitors per day. That means without caching or anything you'll come in under 3TB. Now add in a proxy service like Cloudflare and the simplest load balancing techniques (like round robin on your images and videos) and you won't need to worry about keeping out of trouble.

So this is why I say..  "If you're starting out, just go virtual, with a plan to switch to dedicated servers when you start hitting say 25,000 - 50,000 unique visitors per day.  That'll keep your budget down around $20 per month, until you're ready to crank it up. "
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7. what is the best WordPress self hosting plan when starting out? 

"Short Version: If starting out low volume, just go Virtual then switch to dedicated later."

Well for the money, dedicated are way more more powerful than virtual, but they're less flexible and they really have a $100/m minimum entry fee. Virtual give you the ability to expand and contract instantly to meet demands, but that's an expansion strategy you can also keep up your sleeve for later. Like say if you had a big live event and needed to stream, you could spawn virtual machines to handle it but keep your main processing back on your main server.

Phoenix Nap looks the ultimate hosting choice, if you're established.
This is where I found the relatively unheard of, PhoenixNap to be the best, for several reasons. 
  1. They're super webmaster friendly. Almost unheard of in mainstream, but they're a top 10 player in the mega high traffic realm of the adult entertainment sector, because they're related to CCBill. So they wont go Nazi on you if you actually try to put their systems to work. (Like virtual shared hosts will).
  2. Great prices and deals on dedicated servers.
  3. Great 15TB base bandwidth quotas.
  4. Only 0.0035c per GB on bandwidth. 1/3rd the cost of the average.

The catch with PhoenixNap, is that while you can get a cheap server around $40, such a machine is no good for our purposes until around $100 per month. Unless you only need the server to host images and don't need CPU.

At that price you start dealing with NVMe drives and compute benchmarks over 12,000 with 6+ core CPU's. That's pretty much 3x-6x the power and bandwidth that you'll get at any of these other hosting companies.
But again, when you're starting out, you don't need all that, so wait until you've hit 25,000 unique visitors per day.

Disclaimer: I'm not associated with PhonenixNap nor do I get anything for referring you, I've just been a long time customer of these guys. For over 10 years, and they're a seriously solid operation.

However, once again, here's the problem... If you're just starting out, there's no way you're going to need to service 300,000 visitors per day. So you just don't need that kind of horsepower.