Adding a Second WordPress Site to the Same VPS

One of the reasons a VPS is worth the extra work over shared hosting: you can run as many sites as the server’s resources support, at no additional hosting cost per site.

The pattern is the same every time.

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Step 1 — Create the Web Root

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/secondsite.com
sudo chown nginx:nginx /var/www/secondsite.com

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Step 2 — Create the Database

mysql -u root -p

CREATE DATABASE secondsite_db CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;
CREATE USER 'secondsite_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'strong-password-here';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON secondsite_db.* TO 'secondsite_user'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit;

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Step 3 — Create the Nginx Server Block

sudo nano /etc/nginx/conf.d/secondsite.com.conf

Copy the server block from your first site’s config and update three things:

• server_name — new domain
• root — new web root path
• Log file paths — new filenames

server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    server_name secondsite.com www.secondsite.com;

    root /var/www/secondsite.com;
    index index.php index.html;

    access_log /var/log/nginx/secondsite.com.access.log;
    error_log  /var/log/nginx/secondsite.com.error.log;

    set $skip_cache 0;
    if ($request_method = POST) { set $skip_cache 1; }
    if ($query_string != "") { set $skip_cache 1; }
    if ($request_uri ~* "(/wp-admin/|/xmlrpc.php|/wp-login.php|wp-.*.php|/feed/|sitemap(_index)?.xml)") {
        set $skip_cache 1;
    }

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        try_files $uri =404;
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php-fpm/www.sock;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_cache WORDPRESS;
        fastcgi_cache_valid 200 301 302 1h;
        fastcgi_cache_bypass $skip_cache;
        fastcgi_no_cache $skip_cache;
        add_header X-Cache-Status $upstream_cache_status always;
    }

    location ~* \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico|svg|woff|woff2)$ {
        expires max;
        log_not_found off;
        access_log off;
    }

    location ~ /\. { deny all; }
    location ~* wp-config.php { deny all; }
}

Test and reload:

sudo nginx -t && sudo systemctl reload nginx

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Step 4 — Install WordPress

cd /var/www/secondsite.com
sudo wget https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
sudo tar -xzf latest.tar.gz
sudo mv wordpress/* .
sudo rm -rf wordpress/ latest.tar.gz
sudo cp wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php
sudo chown -R nginx:nginx /var/www/secondsite.com/

Edit wp-config.php with the new database credentials:

sudo nano wp-config.php
# Update DB_NAME, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD
# Update Redis database number (use 1, 2, 3... not 0)

Redis database number in wp-config.php:

define( 'WP_REDIS_DATABASE', 1 );  // 0 is used by the first site

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Step 5 — SSL Certificate

Point the new domain’s DNS A record to your VPS IP first. Once propagated:

sudo certbot --nginx -d secondsite.com -d www.secondsite.com

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Step 6 — Complete WordPress Installation

Visit https://secondsite.com in browser and complete the WordPress installer.

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How Many Sites Can One VPS Handle?

With FastCGI cache and Redis configured, cached page requests use almost no PHP or database resources. The limiting factor for multi-site VPS is:

• RAM — PHP-FPM workers, MariaDB, Redis all consume RAM
• Disk — each site’s uploads directory grows over time
• CPU — cache misses and wp-cron jobs compete for CPU

A 4GB Vultr VPS with the stack in this series comfortably handles 6+ low-to-medium traffic WordPress sites. For sites with consistent traffic above a few thousand daily visitors, monitor RAM carefully and consider a dedicated VPS per high-traffic site.