How To Create Multiple Website With Single IP Address in IIS

Written by Mike

Tuesday, 25 December 2007

Internet Information Services aka IIS allows you run multiple web sites on a single Internet Protocol (IP). You do not have to alter the port (people would have a hard time finding your site if you weren't using the default port 80) to make this work. Let me explain this concept to you.

IIS has this unique feature called Host Header, which allows you to map unique names to a specific web site. When a user calls a domain name (in our example we are using okaay.com) it will process the request through IIS site(s) and check if we have any Host Header value with okaay.com. This tutorial also assumes that you know how to use DNS and that the domain name(s) you're using is pointing to the IIS server.

Okaay, let's go through the steps on how to even set this up. It will make more sense once you see how it's done.

First step is open IIS Manager.

Clik Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Internet Information Services
Under Web Sites right click on your server and goto properties
Next thing you need to do is click on Advanced button
Click on the Add button and enter the IP address, port, and the alias you would like to use. In our example we use the domain Okaay.com.
So if we goto the Site "forum.okaay.com" we would do the same. Add the header forum.okaay.com and click Ok.