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Setting up virtual hosting

Written by
Updated at August 29, 2024

This use case describes how to set up virtual hosting, i.e., how to use Yandex Application Load Balancer to host multiple websites with different domain names on the same IP address.

As examples, we are going to use these three domain names: site-a.com, site-b.com, and default.com.

To create a virtual hosting:

  1. Prepare your cloud.
  2. Create a cloud network.
  3. Reserve a static public IP address.
  4. Create security groups.
  5. Import TLS certificates of the sites to Yandex Certificate Manager.
  6. Create instance groups for websites.
  7. Upload the site files to the VMs.
  8. Create backend groups.
  9. Create and configure HTTP routers.
  10. Create an L7 load balancer.
  11. Configure the DNS for the sites.
  12. Test the hosting.

If you no longer need the resources you created, delete them.

Prepare your cloud

Sign up for Yandex Cloud and create a billing account:

  1. Go to the management console and log in to Yandex Cloud or create an account if you do not have one yet.
  2. On the Yandex Cloud Billing page, make sure you have a billing account linked and it has the ACTIVE or TRIAL_ACTIVE status. If you do not have a billing account, create one.

If you have an active billing account, you can go to the cloud page to create or select a folder for your infrastructure to operate in.

Learn more about clouds and folders.

The cost of virtual hosting includes:

Create a cloud network

All the resources created in the use case will belong to the same cloud network.

To create a network:

  1. In the management console, select Virtual Private Cloud.
  2. Click Create network.
  3. Specify the network Name: vhosting-network.
  4. In the Advanced field, select Create subnets.
  5. Click Create network.

Reserve a static public IP address

For your virtual hosting to run, you need to assign a static public IP address to the L7 load balancer.

To reserve an IP address:

  1. In the management console, select Virtual Private Cloud.
  2. In the left-hand panel, select IP addresses. Click Reserve address.
  3. In the window that opens, select the ru-central1-a availability zone. Click ** Reserve**.

Create security groups

Security groups include rules that allow the load balancer to receive incoming traffic and redirect it to the VMs so they can receive the traffic. In this use case, we will create two security groups: one for the load balancer and another one for all VMs.

To create security groups:

  1. In the management console, select Virtual Private Cloud.

  2. In the left-hand panel, select Security groups.

  3. Create a security group for the load balancer:

    1. Click Create security group.

    2. Enter the group Name: vhosting-sg-balancer.

    3. Select the Network: vhosting-network.

    4. Under Rules, create the following rules using the instructions below the table:

      Traffic
      direction      		 Description Port range Protocol Source /
      destination      		 CIDR blocks
      Outgoing any All Any CIDR 0.0.0.0/0
      Incoming ext-http 80 TCP CIDR 0.0.0.0/0
      Incoming ext-https 443 TCP CIDR 0.0.0.0/0
      Incoming healthchecks 30080 TCP Load balancer healthchecks —

    5. Select the Egress or Ingress tab.

    6. Click Add rule.

    7. In the Port range field of the window that opens, specify a single port or a range of ports that traffic will come to or from.

    8. In the Protocol field, specify the appropriate protocol or leave Any to allow traffic transmission over any protocol.

    9. In the Destination name or Source field, select the purpose of the rule:

      • CIDR: Rule will apply to the range of IP addresses. In the CIDR blocks field, specify the CIDR and masks of subnets that traffic will come to or from. To add multiple CIDRs, click Add CIDR.
      • Security group: Rule will apply to the VMs from the current group or the selected security group.
      • Load balancer healthchecks: Rule allowing a load balancer to health check VMs.

    10. Click Save. Repeat the steps to create all the rules from the table.

    11. Click Save.

  4. In the same way, create a security group for the VM named vhosting-sg-vms with the same vhosting-network network and the following rules:

    Traffic
    direction    		 Description Port range Protocol Source CIDR blocks
    Incoming balancer 80 TCP Security group vhosting-sg-balancer
    Incoming ssh 22 TCP CIDR 0.0.0.0/0

Import TLS certificates of the sites to Certificate Manager

To enable user access to the sites using the secure HTTPS protocol (HTTP over TLS), you must have TLS certificates for the sites. To use certificates in the L7 load balancer, import the certificates to Certificate Manager.

If your sites do not have certificates, you can obtain them from Certificate Manager Let's Encrypt®. You do not need to do anything else after creating certificates this way, because the certificates are imported automatically.

To import an existing certificate for site-a.com:

  1. In the management console, select Certificate Manager.
  2. Click Add certificate and select the User certificate option.
  3. Enter a Name for the certificate: vhosting-cert-a.
  4. In the Certificate field, click Add certificate. Upload the File with your certificate or enter its Content and click Add.
  5. If your certificate is issued by a third-party certificate authority, click Add chain in the Intermediate certificate chain field. Upload the File with the certificate chain or enter its Content and click Add.
  6. In the Private key field, click Add private key. Upload the File with the key or enter its Content and click Add.
  7. Click Create.

In the same way, import certificates for site-b.com and default.com, naming them vhosting-cert-b and vhosting-cert-default.

Create instance groups for the sites

Compute Cloud VMs will act as web servers for the two websites: one group of multiple identical instances for each website. In this use case, the servers will be deployed on a LEMP stack (Linux, NGINX, MySQL®, PHP). For more information, see the Website on a LAMP or LEMP stack use case.

To create an instance group for site-a.com:

  1. In the management console, select Compute Cloud.

  2. In the left-hand panel, select Instance groups. Click Create group of virtual machines.

  3. Enter the instance group name: vhosting-ig-a.

  4. Under Allocation, select multiple availability zones to ensure fault tolerance of your hosting.

  5. Under Instance template, click Define.

  6. Under Boot disk image, open the Marketplace tab and click Show all Marketplace products. Select LEMP and click Use.

  7. Under Computing resources:

    • Choose a VM platform.
    • Specify the required number of vCPUs and the amount of RAM.

    This minimum configuration is enough for functional website testing:

    • Platform: Intel Ice Lake
    • Guaranteed vCPU performance: 20%
    • vCPU: 2
    • RAM: 1 GB

  8. Under Network settings, select the Network named vhosting-network that you created earlier and its subnets.

  9. In the Public address field, select Auto.

  10. Select the previously created vhosting-sg-vms security group.

  11. Specify the VM access data:

    • Enter the username in the Login field.

    • In the SSH key field, paste the contents of the public key file.

      You need to create a key pair for the SSH connection yourself. To learn how, see Connecting to a VM via SSH.

    Alert

    Once created, the VM gets an IP address and a host name (FQDN) for connections. If you selected No address in the Public address field, you will not be able to access the VM from the internet.

  12. Click Save.

  13. Under Scaling, enter a Size for the instance group: 2.

  14. Under Integration with Application Load Balancer, select Create target group and enter vhosting-tg-a as the group name. You can read more about target groups here.

  15. Click Create.

Follow the same steps to create a second instance group named vhosting-ig-b and a target group named vhosting-tg-b for site-b.com.

It may take a few minutes to create an instance group. When the group status changes to RUNNING and the status of all its VMs to RUNNING_ACTUAL, you can upload the website files to them.

ig-running

Upload the site files to the VMs

To check that your web servers are running properly, upload two different index.html files (with different contents) to the VMs: use one file for the vhosting-ig-a instance group, and the other file for the vhosting-ig-b instance group.

Sample index.html file for the vhosting-ig-a group
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Site A</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>This is site A</p>
  </body>
</html>
Sample index.html file for the vhosting-ig-b group
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Site B</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>This is site B</p>
  </body>
</html>

To upload a file to a VM:

  1. Go to the VM page of the management console. In the Network section, find the VM's public IP address.

  2. Connect to the VM over SSH.

  3. Grant your user write access to the /var/www/html directory:

    sudo chown -R "$USER":www-data /var/www/html

    sudo chown -R "$USER":apache /var/www/html

  4. Upload the website files to the VM via SCP.

    Use the scp command-line utility:

    scp -r <path_to_file_directory> <VM_username>@<VM_IP_address>:/var/www/html

    Use WinSCP to copy the local file directory to /var/www/html on the VM.

Repeat these steps for the files you want to upload to each VM in the vhosting-ig-a and vhosting-ig-b groups.

Create backend groups

Target groups created together with instance groups must be linked to the backend groups that define the traffic allocation settings.

For the backends, groups will implement health checks: the load balancer will periodically send health check requests to the VMs and expect a response after a certain delay.

To create a backend group for site-a.com:

  1. In the management console, select Application Load Balancer.
  2. In the left-hand panel, select Backend groups. Click Create backend group.
  3. Enter a Name for the backend group: vhosting-bg-a.
  4. Under Backends, click Add.
  5. Enter a Name for the backend: vhosting-backend-a.
  6. In the Target groups field, select the vhosting-tg-a group.
  7. Specify the Port that the backend VMs will use to receive incoming traffic from the load balancer: 80.
  8. Click Add health check.
  9. Specify the Port that the backend VMs will use to accept health check connections: 80.
  10. Enter the Path to be accessed by the load balancer for health checks: /.
  11. Click Create.

Follow the same steps to create the second backend group named vhosting-bg-b for site-b.com. In the group, create the vhosting-backend-b backend and link the vhosting-tg-b target group to it.

Create and configure HTTP routers

Backend groups must be linked to HTTP routers that define the HTTP request routing rules. In this use case, you will create two routers for the "main" sites (site-a.com and site-b.com) and the "default" router for the default.com site, which will respond to each request with the 404 Not Found HTTP status code.

Create HTTP routers for sites

To create an HTTP router for site-a.com:

  1. In the management console, select Application Load Balancer.
  2. In the left-hand panel, select HTTP routers. Click Create HTTP router.
  3. Enter a Name for the HTTP router: vhosting-router-a.
  4. Click Add virtual host.
  5. Enter a Name for the virtual host: vhosting-host-a.
  6. In the Authority field, specify the site domain name: site-a.com.
  7. Click Add route.
  8. Enter a Name for the route: vhosting-route-a.
  9. In the Backend group field, select the vhosting-bg-a group.
  10. Click Create.

Follow the same steps to create the vhosting-router-b HTTP router for site-b.com and link the vhosting-bg-b backend group to it.

Create the "default" HTTP router

To create an HTTP router for the default.com site:

  1. In the management console, select Application Load Balancer.

  2. In the left-hand panel, select HTTP routers. Click Create HTTP router.

  3. Enter a Name for the HTTP router: vhosting-router-default.

  4. Click Add virtual host.

  5. Enter a Name for the virtual host: vhosting-host-default.

  6. In the Authority field, specify the site domain name: default.com.

  7. Click Add route.

  8. Enter a Name for the route: vhosting-route-a.

  9. In the Action field, select Response.

  10. In the HTTP status code field, select 404 Not Found.

  11. In the Response body field, click Select. Select the Text method and enter the following in the Content field:

    404 Not Found

This is the default site.

    Click Add.

  12. Click Create.

Create an L7 load Balancer

To create a load balancer:

  1. In the management console, select Application Load Balancer.
  2. Click Create L7 load balancer.
  3. Enter a Name for the load balancer: vhosting-alb.
  4. Under Network settings, select the vhosting-sg-balancer security group that you created earlier.
  5. Create a listener to redirect HTTP requests to HTTPS:
    1. Under Listeners, click Add listener.
    2. Enter a Name for the listener: vhosting-listener-http.
    3. Under Public IP address, select the List type and the IP address you reserved earlier.
    4. In the Protocol field, select Redirect to HTTPS.
  6. Create an HTTPS request listener:
    1. Click Add listener again.
    2. Enter a Name for the listener: vhosting-listener-https.
    3. Under Public IP address, select the List type and the IP address you reserved earlier.
    4. In the Protocol field, select HTTPS.
    5. Under Main listener, select the vhosting-cert-default certificate and the vhosting-router-default HTTP router.
    6. Add an SNI match for site-a.com:
      1. Click Add SNI match.
      2. Enter a Name for the SNI match: vhosting-sni-a.
      3. In the Server names field, enter site-a.com.
      4. Select the vhosting-cert-a certificate and the vhosting-router-a HTTP router.
    7. Follow the same steps to add an SNI match for site-b.com: with the name vhosting-sni-b, server name site-b.com, certificate vhosting-cert-b, and HTTP router vhosting-router-b.
  7. Click Create.

Configure the DNS for the sites

The site-a.com, site-b.com, and default.com domain names must be mapped to the L7 load balancer IP address using DNS records.

To configure the DNS for site-a.com:

  1. In the management console, select Application Load Balancer.

  2. Copy the IP address of the load balancer that you created.

  3. On the site of your DNS hosting provider, go to the DNS settings.

  4. Create or edit the A record for site-a.com so that it points to the copied IP address:

    site-a.com. A <L7_load_balancer_IP_address>

    If you use Yandex Cloud DNS, follow this guide to configure the record:

    Configuring DNS records for Cloud DNS
    1. In the management console, select Cloud DNS.
    2. If you do not have a public DNS zone, create one:
      1. Click Create zone.
      2. Enter a Name for the zone: vhosting-dns-a.
      3. In the Zone field, enter the site domain name with a dot at the end: site-a.com.
      4. Select a Type of the zone: Public.
      5. Click Create.
    3. Create a record in the zone:
      1. In the list of zones, click vhosting-dns-a.
      2. Click Create record.
      3. Leave the Name field empty so that the record matches the site-a.com domain name (rather than a name with a subdomain, such as www.site-a.com).
      4. Select the record Type: A.
      5. In the Data field, paste the copied IP address of the load balancer.
      6. Click Create.

Follow the same steps to configure the DNS for site-b.com and default.com using the same IP address.

Wait 15-20 minutes after setting up the DNS and check that the sites are up and running.

Test the hosting

To test the hosting, open each of the three sites in your browser:

Delete the resources you created

To shut down the hosting and stop paying for the created resources:

  1. Delete the non-billable resources that block the deletion of billable resources:
    1. Delete the vhosting-alb L7 load balancer.
    2. Delete the HTTP routers: vhosting-router-a, vhosting-router-b, and vhosting-router-default.
    3. Delete the backend groups: vhosting-bg-a and vhosting-bg-b.
  2. Delete the vhosting-ig-a and vhosting-ig-b instance groups.
  3. Delete the static public IP address that you reserved.
  4. If you used Yandex Cloud DNS, delete the DNS records and delete the DNS zone.
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