How to Host Multiple Websites on One IP Address Using IIS

Many new IIS users mistakenly believe they need a separate IP address for each website they host—but that’s not the case. Internet Information Services (IIS) supports hosting multiple sites on a single IP using a feature called site bindings. With the right configuration, you can efficiently run several websites from one server or VPS, even if it only has one IP address. In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to set up multiple sites on IIS using host headers, and explain what you need to know to do it securely and efficiently.

IIS Site Bindings

Site bindings are what IIS uses to "glue" a website url to both a directory location and an IP/Port address. What is not so obvious at first glance is that the IP address may be set to the SAME IP for each site or else set to a wildcard (any available). This works well if your server/VPS has only one IP address.

Here is the step by step to set this up for an IIS website

1. Open Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.
2. In the Connections pane, expand the Sites node in the tree, and then click to select the site for which you want to add a binding.
3. Click Bindings in the Actions pane.
4. Enter the following information in the "Add Site Binding" window:
   Type In the drop-down list, select https.
   IP address In the drop-down list, select All Unassigned.
   Port Enter 443 / 80 for non-SSL.
   Hostname Enter your website’s DNS name (e.g. website1.domain.com).
   Require Server Name Indication Do not check this check box; not required.
   SSL certificate (if needed) In the drop-down list, select the SSL Certificate by its friendly name (*YourCertificateFriendlyName).
5. Click OK.

The host headers should now be properly configured for that website.

Repeat these steps as needed for all sites to which you want to assign host headers.

You can verify the changes by opening each site in a web browser. IIS is not hard to manage for normal websites. Where it can get tricky is with dynamic content and database integration.

Here the Microsoft licensing structure can end up costing a small fortune and this is the point at which you must decide to either pay up or start using alternatives such as MySQL databases which also work with IIS and ASP.NET.

You can, of course, install what is known as a WAMP stack (Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP) but that is beyond this article scope.

Keep your Windows updated and patched and it should last well.

Happy Hosting!