This is quite a complex piece, so you can skip to the next section if you run on host-gator or have your server up already. If you are going to go with a hosting provider, we recommend doing some research into “WordPress Friendly” hosting sites that have setups that are best configured for running your WordPress install. By far the most common and popular WordPress hosting sites is WPEngine.
Running a website was always on the cards for me, being a total nerd it was just the done thing. There is a lot less to it than your might think, but don’t let that fool you into thinking it’s simple.
This section will cover the basics of getting yourself up and running on either a popular option (Shared Hosting) and an alternative that I use which provides the ultimate in scale and control (Roll-your-own).
Option 1: Shared Hosting
Shared Hosting basically means you are given access to a small piece of a server which will let you store and transfer files, create and manage databases, run an application/web server, and configure settings – all of which form the underlying requirements for a WordPress (or any) website.
A quick search around for “getting started with WordPress” or “how do I host my own WordPress” will show you just how popular this option is.
Which Hosting Provier? We will save the debate on pro’s and con’s for the comments below, but let’s just say that there are a lot of options as to who to go to (find a “WordPress Friendly” host) and who to avoid. The most important piece of advice I can give you is watch out for cheap and if you can afford it, get a “WordPress Friendly” host. Why? There are a few items we will cover off later related to PHP settings (the code behind WordPress) and security setup that some providers will not budge on that may cause you some issues with your sites configuration or growth, so make sure you read a few reviews before making a purchase.
We recommend WPEngine. if you just want to run WordPress site(s).
Option 2: Roll-Your-Own Server
Amazon Web Services have a huge range of products on offer that can help support, scale, and grow your back office, but we are only interested in a few and luckily they are all available on Free Tier!
Note: Free Tier is Amazon’s way of providing new users, especially startups with enough stuff for free to get their business and online platform up and running.
Let’s get into it, to start jump on the aws.amazon.com website and sign yourself up. You will need a credit card to complete this process but no payment is required up front and you will be able to keep this account free for up to a year.
Once you have signed up, log in to your dashboard and you will be greeted with an impressive (and potentially overwhelming) list of services you now have access to.
What we are going to do is launch and instance on EC2, which basically means you will be creating a new server in the cloud. The simplest way to do this is to launch from the AWS Marketplace, which have popular instances that are already set up for specific purposes; in this case a WordPress Server.
Note: AWS is a massive topic, so there is some great information and further reading in the Resources section.
On your dashboard, find the little icon for EC2. It will look something like this –>
Next, click on the big blue LAUNCH button
You will be taken to the launch process wizard which will help you launch your server. We are actually going to make it even easier by using the “1-click-launch” method from the AWS Marketplace, so click on the AWS Marketplace tab on the left
Once in the AWS Marketplace search for bitnami multisite and select the 64bit version, which should be the top result.
Note: I highly recommend multisite for your first install due to the ease at which you can create new websites, fast. Copy, clone, run up a test version of a new site; all in a few seconds. More information on using multisite is coming up in the Advanced section.
Once you have installed and launched your instance with the steps above you will now have a running instance in your EC2 dashboard. First things first, let’s get in there and change our administrator password!
Your WordPress installation will be available from the public dns which you can find by clicking on your instance and looking at the settings in the following window.
Once you have closed the obvious security risk (password), you can now go onto the other critical setting updates to get yourself ready for your first site. Don’t worry, this won’t take long but is critical to ensure everything works well for your sites.
One of the great features of Amazon Web Services is the availability of what they call elastic ip’s.
This allows you to basically reserve an IP address for yourself and your instance which you can point your DNS records (more on this below) to and always have access to your site publicly, even if you restart it. If this is going over your head, just think of it as having a post office box. You don’t need to check the mail everyday but you know it will always be in the same spot when you go to check it.
To set up an elastic IP, simply choose the option from the EC2 dashboard.
Then click Yes, Allocate 
And you are done!
You can then associate this with your new instance by clicking the Associate Address button. 
Then just add your instance ID or tag name and click Associate.
That’s it. You will now have a permanent (static) IP allocated to your new instance. If you need to restart it for any reason, the new IP will be reallocated automatically.
Note: AWS charges you for IP’s that you have allocated (created) and have not associated to an instance, so if you aren’t using your elastic IP’s be sure to Release Address which sends them back to the available pool.
Note: Memory – PHP requires more than the 612mb offered on the Free Tier Micro instances, but if you are only going to be using this for development and test, this is enough to run a heap of sites and a few users at a time.
Another quick note on using AWS is access to a Content Distribution Network (CDN). If you haven’t heard of this, basically it means your content will be spread out all over the globe and will be faster and more reliably accessible anywhere – good news if you are running a site that has a global readership. We will cover 2 of AWS’s services; S3 and Cloudfront in a bit more detail in the Advanced section.
Your Domain and DNS
Now that you have allocated a static IP to your instance, you now want to make sure your Domain Name is pointed to your instance. Amazon Web Services offer a DNS hosting service called Route53, which is actually quite easy to use and very fast.
To set up a new domain in Route53, select the Hosted Zones option.
Here you Create Hosted Zone which is adding a new Domain Name. Enter in the name of your existing Domain (if you haven’t created one yet, you can do this in AWS, Google Admin, or through one of myriad services like GoDaddy) and click Save.
You should now see the new hosted zone created. Select it to see the new name servers on the right.
These name servers are not yet active, you need to change your existing name servers in your hosting provider to point to these. Just copy and paste them.
Domain name server changes aren’t usually immediate and depend on how quickly your hosting provider updates it’s servers. You can check this with a great free tool call MX Toolbox. Enter your domain name and selecte DNS Check from the option button. This will show you which name servers are currently live.
If your Route 53 name servers aren’t yet listed, wait about 15 minutes and check again. We recommend bookmarking this tool as it will help with many checks and updates if you are running your own server.
Once your name servers are active, you can set up your A Name record to point anyone accessing your domain to your new WordPress instance. This might sound a little confusing, but you don’t need to worry about it too much – WordPress does a lot of the tricky stuff in the background for you. You just need to ensure your domains are pointing to your server.
To do this we go back to our Hosted Zone and Create Record Set.
You can see here one that is created already for one of our sites. From the drop down menu on the right select A-name record and in the Value box enter your WordPress server elastic IP address that you allocated in the previous step
. Hit the Create button and you are all done. Again, this will take some time (up to 4 hours) for the internet fairies to do their work. You can check in on it using the MX Toolbox, this time choosing the DNS Loopkup tool. When it is complete you should see you elastic IP resolve into the IP Address column like this:
You can repeat this exact step for all your sites if you create them on the same multisite install. We have over 30 sites running off the same instance.
We’ve actually left the network default as the public DNS record for our multisite – this way it’s easier to catch any low level failures and security hacks.
Getting Reliable Email with @yourdomain.com
If you already have reliable email for your domain, you can skip this section and move on to Domain Mapping below. If you would like to learn how to have multiple (read – unlimited) ***@yourdomain.com email addresses to help you organise your visitors communications and business, all for under $5 a month, read on..
We’re Google-fans. No denying it, they have awesome stuff. I looked around for a way to get @yourdomain.com and found loads of varying products with wide-ranging reviews and many with a ton of multi-step configuration options which seemed too hard for me at the time. Along came an ad for Google Apps for Business (recently renamed Google Apps for Work), espousing the power of Gmail backing your emails – sold.
The beauty of this is it’s simplicity and scalability. It is pretty much a whole IT shop based in the cloud, maintained by Google (so you know you will have 100% uptime/availability) and you pay on-demand, so it’s cheap – as low as $5 a month for everything a small business would need from a back office.
Signing up for Google Apps for Business is really simple. Once you have signed up you will need to authenticate your domain and if you want to use Gmail as your business email server then you will also need to redirect your MX records using DNS. This sounds difficult, but it’s actually quite easy, just follow these steps.
Part 1: Setting up Google Apps for Work
Setting up is a quick 2 minute, 3 step process. No credit card (yet), just a few details and you are away.
- Enter some contact information
- Choose your domain setup
- Confirm you are a human and accept the standard terms…bam! You’re done.
If you are having any troubles setting up Google Apps, we can help, leave a comment below or contact us using one of the email forms or in the About page, or just email support@rapidexecutive.com and we will get you started straight away. We have helped businesses get started and migrate to Google from their old systems and we are a Google partner.
We continue these and more kick-starter tips for small businesses in a brand new course we are opening up very soon. To find out more, email us on enquiries@rapidexecutive.com
Installing Domain Mapper
This is quite a simple task but makes having multiple sites so much easier.
You can even add redirects here simply for www. to all your sites or if you both a .com and a .com.au and want them both to redirect to 1 site, this plugin will make that a breeze.
Note: Don’t try and install this via the normal ADD NEW plugin button as it will copy the files to the “plugins” directory and it won’t work. Top this with the fact that having these dormant files in the wrong folder will actually add around 6 seconds to all your sites load times – this can be quite a costly mistake. If you have tried to install this automatically in the past, you will need to get into your FTP application and delete the folder “wordpress-mu-domain-mapper” from the PLUGINS directory.
Multi-Site and the issues with URLs
If you have installed using AWS there is one small change that needs to be made that isn’t documented in the Bitnami, AWS, or WordPress installation instructions and caused endless hours of issues until we discovered this simple fix.
You will need to access your database to make this change.
There are 3 main configuration settings that affect how your site is accessed by people. They are all configuring the URL of the site and sometimes you will have to manually edit them to ensure you get a consistent experience for your visitors accessing, logging in, and logging out of your site.
SITE-URL
HOME-URL
and
Adding a New Site to Multisite Network
Apart from the obvious multiple site benefits, adding a new subdomain site (like newsite.yourdomain.com) has some other quite nice uses too – Testing!
You can set up a new site in 14 clicks (I counted them) and be up and running in 45 seconds…ok follow along
Step 1) Under your Network dashboard, go to the SITES tab and click ADD NEW
Step 2) Enter a subdomain name into the Site Address field (like: testserver), update the Site Title to something to help you identify the site (like: Test Server For My Real Site) and put in your network Admin Email address
Your new site will be set up (yep, it’s that simple) – but you still need to do a couple more things to finalise it. If you are using AWS you will need to do this additional step to update the base install site if you are still using the ec2-ip-ip-ip-ip.compute-1.amazonaws.com address. Note: Following this simple step will not work for wildcard domains on AWS, you will need to add a wildcard to your existing domain. Alternatively you can contact us if you are having problems.
Click on the Edit Site link as shown here. You will be taken to the site admin area.
Simply change the Domain entry to newsite.yourdomain.com and click Save Changes.
Step 3) Click on the Users tab and ensure your site user has been added to the new site
Step 4) Now let’s find out what the site_id is. Click on Sites again and hover over your newly created site
You will see in the status bar at the bottom of the page, a URL to the new site with an id that looks something like this /site-info.php?id=3 The number you are after is 3.
Step 5) Domain Mapping. Hover over the Settings menu in your Network and click on Domains
Enter the site_id from Step 4 and the new site domain from Step 2, uncheck the Primary button and click SAVE. We will get into Primary later, you don’t need it now.
Congratulations, your site is now up and running.
How did we do? Less than a few minutes walking through that? Let’s dive right in to some of the first steps to make your new Multisite fully-functional.
Sending and Receiving Emails
Out of the box, WordPress uses a function called wp_mail to send email from your servers. This doesn’t play very well with Amazon Web Services and in general, won’t scale with you in the longer term.
Enter a plugin – WP-SES.
Even if you haven’t set up your server on Amazon Web Services, you can still use their Simple Email Service (SES).
The installation of this plugin isn’t the simplest but once you follow these steps (I’ve had to do this 37 times and counting), it will work like a charm and keep you out of people’s spam folders.
Step 1: Install the plugin
You will now see this at the top of your screen. Open up a new tab and go to the next step.
Step 2: Create Your AWS SES Emails
Log into your AWS dashboard and find the SES icon
From here you will see a dashboard, obviously empty if you haven’t used it before. This is what mine looks like:
You just need to click on Email Addresses and add in the one you want to be able to send from. If you have used the GoogleApps info from earlier you can use your new webadmin (group) email. Alternatively you can use any email address you currently have.
Click the Verify a New Email Address button and a pop up will appear for you to enter your email address.
Hit the Verify This Email Address and check your inbox. It can take a few minutes (like 10) for the mail to come through. Click the activation link and you will be good to go.
To Amazon know you are not a spammy-spammer, you need to email them by filling out this form. This will get you “productionised”, which basically means you can send emails on-mass.
Final piece of the puzzle is to get hold of your AWS Account and Secret Keys. Amazon recently deprecated (stopped using) the old key system and have moved to using Identity Access Management (IAM). This is actually a little easier, much more flexible, and a hell of a lot more safe.
Step 3: Update Plugin Settings
You will need your AWS access key and secret key. You will also need to add in the email address you just set up in AWS SES into “Sender Email” field.
Click SAVE and you should see the Keys Accepted message. Sometimes you might not get that with the first refresh, hit it again and check.
Step 4: Activate Plugin
Click “Activate Plugin” and the page will refresh. A little bug here again, it won’t actually say that the plugin has been activated until you hit refresh again..
Step 5: Refresh and Test!
You’re done, you now have your site fully email functional. Well done.
A technically heavy and large bunch of topics covered here, I know. How did you go with those? By now you should have your fresh clean multisite WordPress install, fully integrated with enterprise level email, and be ready to get into the fun stuff…Web Design!
Leave a comment or suggestion below and help shape this content. If you did get stuck on any of this, leave a comment or send us a mail and we will point you in the right direction.