Hosting advice

This is fine so long as you have a separate IP address for each subdomain

I've got a number of apps running with Digital Ocean and Forge. They all have at least one subdomain running off the same server typically:

staging.mydomain.com

www.mydomain.com

One has 4 subdomains - all with separate databases. You just need to set each one to have a separate DNS A Record. Doing it via Digital Ocean and Forge makes it very easy as you get a separate IP address for each site.

but i dont understand how that's possible they say on DigitalOcean that only one IP per droplet.. I don't want to pay 3 times...

Why do you need separate IP's for each application? You don't. Each one can be a virtual host pointing to a different directory.

I am unfamiliar with DigitalOcean though so I won't be able to help you with specifics regarding that, but they should allow you.

@vapenation - yes you are totally correct. I've just logged in to a couple of my accounts and yes they are separate droplets (or servers on Forge). Please ignore my misinformation! I was confusing my vps accounts with Digital Ocean / Forge

A single host is all you need for multiple domains/subdomains.. the only real limitation would be whether that host has enough resources to handle all the traffic you send to it.

For DNS you simply need a wildcard record that will send traffic trying to hit [anything].yourdomain.com to the same IP address. Then for the various subdomains, setup each app as a virtualhost entry with it's servername defined specifically: site1.yourdomain.com etc

You'll likely also want something to be defined as the default so that if no other vhost matches, you still get something -- alternatively you could set up another vhost that acts as a catch-all for any non-matched [sub]domain, and have it just respond with a 404, or something similar.

I ran across another good hosting co. a2 hosting, see if they can help https://www.a2hosting.com/

If you have 3 clients paying, I'd have 3 separate setups / domains. In long run less headache. It don't seem so now, but it will catch up to you later.

I don't want to pay 3 times...

If they are your apps and not Fedex size then yes have the sub domains. Or one site would do it with separate databases. I do that on Godaddy, just the first part looks the same in url, but you can have

• site/myapp1
• site/myapp2

Many ways to achieve this.

But if heavy traffic, I'd have separate sites.

Right now I have a laravel app and a custom framework app on godaddy, but small sites, no heavy traffic.

thanks for your responses, I forgot to mention that there will hardly be any traffic, it's just to show applications in production

Hi again @vapenation

After thinking I was going senile my colleague reminded me of the project that had multiple subdomains running off one digital ocean droplet.

I no longer have access to it so can't check exactly how it was set up. My colleague though is pretty sure it was very straightforward. We just:

1. Set up one server through forge (one ip address)
2. Set up each subdomain as a separate site on the one server (ensuring you don't check the 'Allow Wildcard Sub-Domains' option)
3. Then just created A records for each subdomain - each pointing to the same ip address

After that we think it just worked straight off the bat with no special virtualhost config.

To be doubly sure I just ran a test using my own domain and two A records in Cloudflare. Following the above steps I just created these two static subdomains (no databases or Laravel install but the theory should be the same):

http://subdomain1.screenbeetle.co.uk/

http://subdomain2.screenbeetle.co.uk/

Hope that helps

Does anyone know of any dodgy knock-on effect using this approach?

@Screenbeetle thank you for your insights, one thing though, not sure if i'm required to use Forge? What are the benefits? I am trying to keep the cost to a minimum.

@vapenation I personally use forge because I'm not too up on Sys Admin! Forge takes care of a lot of common tasks - things like setting up new servers / sites, configuring git repos, installing ssl certs etc.

This article explains it well:

https://scotch.io/tutorials/deploy-php-apps-easily-with-laravel-forge