Suppose you want to host a Wordpress Multisite (Wordpress’ multi-tenant implementation) instance at mymultisite.com. Customers will have their own sites on the Multisite install, but won’t be allowed to touch the actual Virtual Server with the Wordpress install (because it’s not just theirs). However, you want to allow customers to have and manage their own email accounts (and have the quota/backup functionality as normal), and also be able to install their own applications in their own directories.
What’s the proper way to do this in Virtualmin? If I have servers such as mymultisite.com (managed by Server Admin)
and customersite.com (alias of mymultisite.com)
it will work as far as the multisite goes, but since mymultisite.com is the server admin’s, they won’t be able to install their own applications and manage email users.
I know there is an “Alias with Own Email” option. Is that the proper way to do this?
As you may recall, wordpress themes and plugins are typically installed via the wordpress admin screens, not with Virtualmin.
While there may be other solutions, and cheaper too, one way (more work for you) is to have a 2nd independent server running Virtualmin; on that server have TOP LEVEL Virtualmin virtual servers for each domain name of each subsite in multisite – but for each domain, only enable email on server #2 while leaving the actual website(s) as wordpress subsites on server #1; that way those email environments have total isolation from each other on server #2.
The complication, as you have mentioned, is having each client manage just their own email environment; as you may have already seen in Virtualmin, if you were to manage all the email accounts yourself for all the clients/subsites, that setup would be very simple and straightforward
I’ve never done this but it should work, in theory.
You have a virtual server with mail disabled on which WordPress multisite is installed. If mail is not disabled, edit virtual server and uncheck the box.
Point the IP address of all the domains you wish to host to the WordPress multisite virtual server and create an alias for the domains on the WordPress multisite virtual server. That takes care of the web hosting part of the problem.
Then, on a different Virtualmin server (or even the same one, if it permits you to do so) create virtual servers with web disabled and just mail enabled for all the domains you wish to host and point the MX records to that virtual server. Obviously, the SPF and DKIM records too. That should take care of the mail hosting part of the problem.
You give your users the credentials of these virtual servers. All your other requirements, such as restricting users to their disk quota for mail and giving them access to Virtualmin to manage their mailboxes can be met via this.
#FeatureRequest - it would be so nice to have two additional options under Enabled Features - Multisite Web and Multisite Mail - so that the same Virtualmin server could be used to offer the kind of solution outlined here - rather than two Virtualmin servers, one for web and one for mail.
