Issues with two Wordpress Multisite installs on the same IP at GoDaddy

Question

I have what I thought was a fairly simple install. GoDaddy support basically said "We don't want to touch it, hire someone".

I have two Wordpress multi-sites installed on CPanel.

Does anyone know if this a supported configuration? OR can only one Wordpress site on cPanel be multi-site?

More detail:

I setup two WP Multisites. It seems like the second Wordpress subsite never gets the GET request for any of the subdomains; the first site seems to get all additional virtual domains.

Let's temporarily assume both Multisite websites are setup correctly. (ha!)

Example:

• A.com ('parent' site, multisite enabled) IP: 1.2.3.4

  • someothersite.org (subsite, edited URL)
  • deleted.org (subsite, edited URL, now actually deleted)

• B.com ('parent' site, multisite enabled) IP: 1.2.3.4

  • AThirdsite.org

If I hit AThirdSite.org, I get a 404 from deleted.org - which was, indeed, deleted and doesn't exist in A.org's multisite install, nor is it mentioned in .htaccess

Under the cPanel "Add on domains" B.com is setup as an add-on domain, but not "AThirdsite.org" nor "someothersite.org" nor deleted.org

This implies I have to mix up clients B.com and A.com, which I don't want to do (there's a WooCommerce site involved).

In other words, I'm not sure that two multi-site installs under the same IP are supported, but I'm not sure why not.

My dirty little secret:

A.com originally had a Multisite install, but I deleted it, and recreated as A.com (can't seem to change this) and now only has one sub site. I can't even log into A.com anymore, as it keeps trying to redirect to deleted.org and thus login fails. deleted.org was never the top level site.

So, two questions:

1. Is this supported? Two separate Wordpress Multi-site installs on the same IP address
2. If it is supported, why are subdomains associated for a deleted site showing up in a redirect?

Contents of .htaccess for A.org:

# Block the include-only files.
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^wp-admin/includes/ - [F,L]
RewriteRule !^wp-includes/ - [S=3]
RewriteRule ^wp-includes/[^/]+\.php$ - [F,L]
RewriteRule ^wp-includes/js/tinymce/langs/.+\.php - [F,L]
RewriteRule ^wp-includes/theme-compat/ - [F,L]
</IfModule>

# BEGIN WordPress
# The directives (lines) between "BEGIN WordPress" and "END WordPress" are
# dynamically generated, and should only be modified via WordPress filters.
# Any changes to the directives between these markers will be overwritten.
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}]
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

I'm about to cancel my entire hosting account, buying a $319 plugin that can backup and migrate multisite, and paying for a new hosting cPanel account.

Please save me :)

Answer 1

I figured out the problem.

First, I had opened a ticket with GoDaddy ProSupport. They told me:

Since it was built using a multisite WordPress structure, I’m afraid that we are unable to work on it because of the liability of making changes that can affect other websites using the same database. We recommend hiring a specialized developer to handle work on this website.

We do have a support article which offers some general advice on setting up multisite environments, but things like this are a bit out of our scope of support. You can check out the article here: https://www.godaddy.com/resources/skills/wordpress-multisite.

It turns out, my MultiSite WAS setup properly. However, when you have this kind of structure that I (the OP) asked about, it's setup with the following "Add on Domain"

A.com ('parent' site, multisite enabled) IP: 1.2.3.4
    /home/public_html
    someothersite.org (subsite, edited URL)

B.com ('parent' site, multisite enabled) IP: 1.2.3.4
    /home/public_html/b.com
    AThirdsite.org

So what you have to do is to go cPanel admin, then go to "Addon Domains" and register athirdsite.org as an addon domain to b.com. Then - very important - make sure to override the Document Root to point to /home/public_html/b.com

Not that when you used cPanel to create b.com, it added the "Addon Domain" for you automatically. For the subsites, you have to do this manually, because you create them via WordPress's sites menu, not via cPanel, so it doesn't know about the second multisite.

IMPLICATION:

I think this means that b.com could never have dynamically assigned sites, but it may be possible to jigger this with the right domains and wildcards.

Note that A.com could have dynamically assigned sites, as any domain that hits the IP address for your Hosting account will automatically go to the default domain.