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Hosting multiple Web sites in one Web application

If you intend to host a large number of low-traffic Web sites that share the same application code (and views), but have their own HTML design and content, you can host all such sites in a single Web application. This approach helps to reduce the total number of resources used by your Web and application server.

Procedure

  1. Access your Presentation Server machine.
  2. Start IIS Manager on this machine.
  3. In the tree on the left, navigate to the IIS Web application in which you want to host multiple Web sites, and select it.
  4. In the Actions panel on the right. in the Edit Site area, select Bindings.
    The Site Bindings dialog opens.
  5. Select Add to add a Web site.
    The Add Site Binding dialog opens.
  6. Specify the Web site by specifying one or more of Type, IP address, Port and/or Host name, and click OK to add the site and return to the Site Bindings dialog.
  7. Repeat steps 5 and 6 as needed to add more Web sites to the Web application.
  8. In the Site Bindings dialog, click Close to return to the main IIS Manager window.
  9. Close IIS Manager.
    • If you are using SDL Tridion 2013 SP1:
      1. Access the bin\config\ subfolder of your Web application.
      2. Open cd_dynamic_conf.xml for editing.
      3. Follow the path Configuration > URLMappings > StaticMappings > Publications.
      4. Add a Publication subelement and set its Id attribute to the Publication ID of the Publication you want to associate with one of your hosted URLs.
      5. Inside the Publication element, create a Host subelement and set the following attributes:
        • Domain - the domain name of your site.
        • Port - the specific port on which this site runs.
        • Protocol - the protocol for the IIS Web application, http or https.
        • Path - the relative path at which you want the Publication to be hosted (defaults to the root path if not specified).
      6. Save and close cd_dynamic_conf.xml.
      7. Restart your Web application.
    • If you are using SDL Web 8, the Topology Manager does all the work for you.
  10. To refresh only one site hosted in your Web application, open a Web browser and access SITE/admin/refresh, where SITE is the URL of the specific site.