[Steven Astravas]

My CBOX multisite at Bluehost was working fine in Nov 2019, but stopped working because I forgot to pay the hosting fee  because I was too busy doing other things. After paying the fee in Jan 2020, I was able to see the main site and its dashboard but not the subsites.  So I tried restoring the entire multisite using UpdraftPlus, but it still had the same problem. After pulling out my hair I moved on to other projects until recently.  Lately, I found out that when I paid the hosting fee in 2020, my site was downgraded to just a main site, but no subdomain capability, so I upgraded it recently so I could restore my subsites.  However, after trying UpdraftPlus again, I still can’t view my subdomains or their dashboards.  So, to see if my CBOX plugin is working, I created a new subdomain named “test” at test.domain.com and added a subsite to it using CBOX, and can verify it on my main site’s network admin’s dashboard, however I can’t view the subsite’s admin’s dashboard. Instead, all I see is the error message at the address:  https://test.domain.com/wp-admin/:

“Not Found
The requested URL was not found on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.”

In addition, using the file manager at Bluehost, the only items under public_html/test are:
–  .well-known (empty folder)
–  .well-known/acme-challenge (empty folder)
–  cgi-bin (empty folder)
–  index.html (a file I uploaded and viewed in my browser to verify that the new security certificate’s SSL is working properly.
– .htaccess (a file with the following lines:
# php — BEGIN cPanel-generated handler, do not edit
# Set the “ea-php74” package as the default “PHP” programming language.
<IfModule mime_module>
AddHandler application/x-httpd-ea-php74 .php .php7 .phtml
</IfModule>
# php — END cPanel-generated handler, do not edit

I’m disappointed that I didn’t see a lot more files in this subsite’s folder.

Note that Bluehost tech support has reloaded my SSL Security certificate for me when I mentioned that CBOX had been throwing the error “Your website appears to use Basic Authentication, which is not currently compatible with Application Passwords.”  But that seems to have gone away for some unknown reason.

Also, Bluehost tech support then referred me to the “plugin’s technical support people”, namely, CBOX and WordPress, for further support on this problem.

What should I do to make my multisite work again?       HELP!!!

 

[Ray]

Hi Steven,

It sounds like you might need to reconfigure wildcard subdomains on Bluehost. Check out the “Setting up Wildcard Subdomains” section of this article: https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-install-and-setup-wordpress-multisite-network/#wildcard

Can you verify that you have set up wildcard subdomains on your Bluehost cPanel dashboard correctly?

[Steven Astravas]

Hi Ray,

Even though my wildcard subdomain *, was set up correctly in my Bluehost cPanel dashboard, the root cause of my subsites’ creation problem was my SSL Certificate not being the right type of certificate for my wildcard subdomain.

To properly set up a subdomain-type WordPress Multisite that uses a wildcard subdomain and only a single installation of WordPress, requires that I purchase a wildcard SSL certificate for it. I was wrong when I had assumed that one was already included in the hosting package I bought that included a “Free SSL Certificate” for my Multisite.  But that Certificate only worked for the main domain within my Multisite, but not for its subdomains. So, a better (and cheaper) solution was to set up my multisite to have subdirectories and not subdomains. This eliminated the need for my purchasing a wildcard SSL certificate to allow subdomains to work after being created using WordPress.  The architecture for my multisite is now progressing smoothly.

I found more reasons why I should build my WordPress Multisite using directories, and not subdomains, at https://wpmudev.com/blog/wordpress-multisite-subdomain/

• This reply was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by Steven Astravas.

[Ray]

Hi Steven,

Glad you were able to switch to a subdirectory set up for your multisite configuration.

[Author]

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