One feature of Stackable is its ability to host many WordPress sites from a single WordPress installation with full domain mapping and SSL support. Each stacked site works as a regular WordPress site with a unique /wp-content/ folder. This is ideal if you wish to host many unrelated sites from a single WordPress site and not have to deal with multisite, which isn’t setup for handling dissimilar sites.
A cost effective way of handling many small WordPress sites for an individual customer.
Let’s take a look at a customer I’ll call average Joe. Joe wants to host 5 WordPress sites. One for his personal domain, a few landing page websites for various events and a few for his various side businesses. The total usage for all 5 sites will be quite lightweight however typically web hosting costs increase per site. With Anchor Hosting average Joe would be looking at a custom plan costing $70/month in order to tack on 4 extra sites under a $20/month basic plan. See hosting plan cost calculator.
With Stackable, average Joe could host these same 5 WordPress sites on a single $20/month basic plan with no need to purchase extra sites. That’s a $600/year savings, well worth the cost of Stackable. Full pricing details for Stackable will be revealed on launch day in late August.
Stacking is not always a good idea.
Just because you can host many sites on a single WordPress site, doesn’t mean you should. Many of the same limitations that come with a multisite network also apply to stacking sites like:
- All stacked sites will shared the same developer information (SFTP/SSH). That’s OK if all sites belong to an individual customer however can get tricky if you plan on stacking different customers sites on the same WordPress site.
- Resource are shared which means the more sites you stack, the more server resources that are going to be required. You’ll need to make sure your hosting plan can handle it.
How Stackable works with Kinsta
In theory Stackable should work with any host provider that supports modifying the wp-config.php file and additional domain mapping with SSL support. That said I haven’t tested it out extensively. I can show you how this works with Kinsta.
The first part requires Stackable to be installed on any WordPress site. Next configure each new stacked site and enable domain mapping with Stackable. That simply sets up custom rules within the wp-config.php to route requests per each site to the proper database prefix.
Within Kinsta each of these domain mappings need to be added to that individual WordPress site. That will look like this as shown here.
Lastly, DNS for each domain needs pointed to Kinsta’s server IP then SSL expanded for each domain.
That it. From this individual WordPress site, Kinsta is now powering 5 unique WordPress sites, including the primary site, from a single WordPress installation. Each of these sites is a standard WordPress site. In fact from the backend of each of these stacked sites, there is nothing that shows it isn’t a regular WordPress site other then the unique wp-content directories.