Hostmonster drupal multisite setup

10 April 2010 banavoz 5 comments

Recently I have moved some of my sites to the Hostmonster hosting. My sites are all built on Drupal, which is very much usable in multisite setup (single drupal folder, multiple sites). As of hostmonster, there are some points that I understood just after I had registered my account with them. I will briefly describe what I discovered during my HM initial exploration .

Directory structure

First of all, do not use your beloved domain name as main domain when you register HostMonster account! This is because HM account main domain is located in parent directory of all other subdomdins and add-on domains. Hostmonster site directory structure looks like this:
Hostmonster directory structure

You see, your main domain is supposed to be parent directory of all other addon domains! Certainly, addon domains should not be sub-directories of the “primary” domain. That is why I suggest to put all domains on your HM account as addon domains and use some “stub” domain as primary. For example, if I have testdomain.com and wish to host it at Hostmonster, I would create main.testdomain.com domain and use it as my primary domain, whereas testdomain.com would be an addon.

Why? – because it is quite handy to keep all domains at the same directory level (as addon domains).

In my case, I used Drupal installation for all my sites at Hostmonster. I found that it is easy to create setup like this:
Hostmonster directory structure for drupal multisite

I’ve created directories for my addon domains as symbolic links to the _drupal directory where actual drupal files were unzipped. In this _drupal directory, there is sites/ subdirectory where all domain configuration files and upload files are to be located. The result looks like on the folowing figure:
Hostmonster directory structure with multisite drupal setup

Note that even though you have single drupal directory shared between several sites, each site should still have its separate database configured in settings.php in corresponding site directory under sites/.

PHP configuration

Drupal is happened to be quite resource-expensive server-side software, especially if some heavy modules are enabled (such as Views, Panels, etc). Luckily, Hostmonster allows clients to extend some vital PHP limits to allow Drupal to function correctly. (Note though, that even default HM settings are enough to host default Drupal setup without any problems). What you have to do to change PHP settings is to put php.ini file to your site root directory. It is possible to do using cPanel of your account. Just navigate to PHP Config under Software / Services. There will be INSTALL PHP.INI MASTER FILE button. By pressing it, you will get php.ini.default file in your public_html directory. All you need to do then is to modify this file as needed and to rename it to php.ini.

Remember tough, that increasing and consuming resources available to your PHP will not add memory/cpu to the physical hardware your site is running on. By increasing available memory amount you interfere with other client sites that are hosted side-by-side on the same server as yours. Doing so will terminate your HM account very likely .

Drupal Boost cache at Hostmonster

In my case (probably it is the whole HM practice) Drupal boost configuration should be set to use %{HTTP_HOST} in “Servers URL or Name:” setting instead of default %{SERVER_NAME}. This affects mod_rewrite configuration in .htaccess which worked correctly with %{HTTP_HOST}, but not with %{SERVER_NAME} in my case.