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Is there a CMS or a CMS plugin (such as for Drupal), that allow me to run multiple sites on a single shared hosting account. The goal is to have multiple domains that point to the same hosting account (which is enabled by the hosting provider). And each domain will display completely different sites (though sharing the same CMS installation and database).

I understand Orchard does this. But, have not been able to find any other.

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    Why would you want to share the same CMS installation and database, yet keep the sites separate? You can install multiple instances of a CMS on your hosting account, no problem. Unless all of your sites have the same content, you are better off picking a CMS that meets your other needs, and just going with multiple instances.
    – Brad
    Sep 27, 2010 at 14:50
  • The reason is that there are set of low volume niche websites. So we cannot afford to pay for multiple hosting accounts. To install multiple instances, we'd have to use subdomains or sub folders. Which is not what we want. We want each site to be served up by a primary domain, such as mysite.com, myothersite.com etc. Think of profile sites for freelancers with their name as the domain. Maybe there's a way to achieve the same with multiple instances? I'm not aware of any.
    – scorpion
    Sep 28, 2010 at 1:57

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This really should be a comment, but haven't got the reputation yet.

There's no way that you can have multiple domains running on the same host if the hosting company doesn't support adding extra domains to the host. The underlying webserver needs to know where the files from a domain is located.

Depending on the host you can sometimes create subfolders within the main folder that behaves as a seperate domain and other times you'll get another folder withing your top-level folder.

Besides that there is several systems that should allow you to do that. On top of my head I think that the newest wordpress version can do that, Silverstripe cms and Jomla should also be able to do that.

UPDATE:

I'm aware of your limitations of the host. The CMS that I listed do support this but not all of them right out of the box, sometimes you need to make small hacks to make it work.

For wordpress you need v3 and see:

http://blog.mixu.net/2010/05/17/setting-up-multisite-wordpress-3-0-with-multiple-different-domains/ http://blog.mixu.net/2010/05/31/wordpress-3-0-multi-site-multi-domain-problems-with-solutions/

For Joomla see: http://docs.joomla.org/Multiple_Domains_and_Web_Sites_in_a_single_Joomla!_installation

For Silverstripe there is a module called subsites which allows this documentation can be found here: http://doc.silverstripe.org/modules:subsites

I have used this in the past, but it may not work with the latest version of the Silverstripe

I think Drupal has this feature as well see this http://drupal.org/node/43816

Hope this helps to give some alternative

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  • What they allow are Domain Aliases (not very useful). Once added both domains point to the same IP. So, the CMS needs to know how to render the correct data for the domain.
    – scorpion
    Oct 2, 2010 at 12:23
  • @Zervox: Thanks for the updated answer. Great coverage! Remarking your's as the answer.
    – scorpion
    Oct 3, 2010 at 16:07
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You can install two instances of a CMS in different subfolders, and then setup an addon domain with your hosting provider. That's how I host two blogs, two instances of wordpress on the same hosting account, but access them from two different top-level domains.

In short it's commonly the hosting provider that provides such a feature, not the CMS.

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  • Makes sense. And I know most hosting solutions offer addons. Mine doesn't unfortunately. I guess then it's Orchard or new hosting I guess :)
    – scorpion
    Sep 29, 2010 at 15:57
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MODx Revolution can do that — http://modxcms.com/ It's free and extensible, runs on PHP+SQL.

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Drupal supports this out of the box, by creating the respective folders in your sites directory.

More information can be found in the handbooks

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