Hosting two domains using only one VPS? [closed]

As complete beginner, I have been trying to host multiple domains on one Apache VPS. Tutorials had too much information that lead me to confusion.

Below I describe, for complete begginers, how to host multiple domains on one VPS server with Ubuntu and Apache.

IMPORTANT! You need to use root account to execute most operations.

IMPORTANT! If you have been trying to make some changes to apache configuration before, undo them.

Creating VirtualHosts

Create folders for your domains on server. For example:

/home/apache/domain1

/home/apache/domain2

Put index.html file in each folder with any text.

This is domain1
This is domain2

Go to /etc/apache2/sites-available folder.

/etc/apache2/sites-available

Create file domain1

sudo nano domain1

<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot /home/apache/domain1
ServerName domain1.com
ServerAlias www.domain1.com
</VirtualHost>

Create file domain2

sudo nano domain2

<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot /home/apache/domain2
ServerName domain2.com
ServerAlias www.domain2.com
</VirtualHost>

You can create subdomains same way.

sudo nano blog

<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot /home/apache/blog
ServerName blog.domain.com
ServerAlias www.blog.domain.com
</VirtualHost>

Enable created sites

sudo a2ensite domain1
sudo a2ensite domain2

Restart apache

sudo service apache2 reload

Redirecting domain to server

Created VirtualHosts will work only if you redirect your domain name to server IP. Domains are just names that can be translated to IP numbers.

Local computer

To test your configuration on local machine, you need to edit hosts file.

sudo nano /etc/hosts

It should look like this.

127.0.0.1       localhost domain1.com domain2.com

Hosts file tells your computer that domain needs to be redirected to local machine.

IMPORTANT! If you create entry in hosts file for existing domain, for example

127.0.0.1       stackoverflow.com

you will lose access to this website.

Server

In order to redirect domain to you web server, you need to create or modify "A"-type DNS record for given domain to IP address of your server. You can do it by panel control provided by your domain registrar.

If you do not know IP address of your server, log in to that server and type in command line:

ifconfig

The procedure is:

1. Point both domains to the ip of the VPS.

2. Configure the webserver you have installed on your VPS to answer to those two domains.

In the case of Nginx with Passenger, it is a matter of adding entries to you nginx.conf file. Like this:

server {
      listen 80;
      server_name domain1;
      root /path/to/your/project;
      passenger_enabled on;
   } 
server {
      listen 80;
      server_name domain2;
      root /path/to/your/project;
      passenger_enabled on;
   }

Check your webserver documentation to do a similar thing.