How To: Create Virtual Servers For Apache Using Webmin

If you don’t have the cash to buy a cPanel license and prefer some point-and-click server management opposed to strictly CLI, then Webmin is perfect for you. Webmin is open-source server management software that works on Ubuntu in any web browser.

If you’ve got your Ubuntu LAMP setup, DNS mapped to your server; then the next step is to start creating virtual hosts for Apache.

What is a virtual host?

By definition: The term Virtual Host refers to the practice of running more than one web site (such as www.company1.com and www.company2.com) on a single machine. Virtual hosts can be “IP-based”, meaning that you have a different IP address for every web site, or “name-based”, meaning that you have multiple names running on each IP address. The fact that they are running on the same physical server is not apparent to the end user.

In English: Imagine what a waste it would be if you could only host one (1) domain per server? With virtual servers, your rig can handled thousands of domains.

Step 1) Create your website’s directory

Go to Others –> File Manager

Navigate to public_html (or var/www/)Click on New and type the name of your website

Step 2) Set directory permissions

Select your folder, then click Info

Make sure the permissions are set to: 0755

Change the ownership and group to: www-data (www-data is the default user/group for Apache)

Apply changes to This directory and all sub-directories

Step 3) Create your virtual host

On the left menu under Servers, click Apache Webserver

Click Create virtual host

Enter your Document Root, and change the Server Name to match your domain

Click Create

Almost done!

You should be back at the Existing virtual hosts screen

Now click on your Virtual Server and then Networking and Addresses

Here you can set the Server admin email (optional) and the Alternate virtual server names

See how I put “www.” in front? If you don’t set an Alternate virtual server name with “www”, then anytime someone types “www.yourdomain.com” the site wont load!

Step 4) Apply Changes

This is important! :)

That’s it!

Wrap up

If your DNS is setup – and pointing at your server’s IP address…then you should see something like this:

It will look like that until you upload some HTML files.