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If you have a live site on example.com, is it possible to allow third-parties to set up their own site at example.com/project1, example.com/project2 etc without subjecting your server to risk?

I know that this is possible via subdomains, e.g. project1.example.com, project2.example.com, but this question is specifically about directories on the same subdomain.

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  • Technically possible but not realistic. It would be a pain and would require some code, system usernames, file permissions, etc. It is just NOT a good idea. Unless there is some weirdo package that does this for you already... which I doubt. – closetnoc Dec 31 '15 at 2:28
  • Sigh... disappointing. I guess I'll have them submit all files to me and review html, php, and javascript for security vulnerabilities manually. – Knocks X Dec 31 '15 at 6:25
  • You can do it if you are fairly familiar with file level security and security within your web server and can write code. However, it would be some real work and you would have to be very careful. I would not take on the task for my own web server. Sorry. It maybe that something like cPanel can do something like you want, however, it is not designed for that specifically as much as securing a single site or sites. – closetnoc Dec 31 '15 at 16:24
  • cPanel/WHM does something like this allowing per user open_basedir restrictions and then jailing them to it, so user-a, becomes accessible at mydomain.com/~user-a/ but does not have access to mydomain.com/. – Kraang Prime Jan 30 '16 at 10:14
  • You can allow them in Wordpress multisite but if I am assuming right and you are talking about something like open source projects, this would take a lot of bandwidth as the website gets popular, and eventually slows down your page but you can let only approved users to create websites in wp multisite, so you can filter them and/or give a criteria for like 2 project participations or whatever. – knif3r Feb 29 '16 at 7:37
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Yes, it is possible, if you did not set any permission to Root Domain.

For example, if you install WordPress blog in subdirectory like example.com/blog/ and let's assume, your blog is hijacked by hackers, then they can change index page of /blog address(Because they have access to WP database), they can't change anything in your root domain unless, you are not using same database, or completely different database. So, it's depends on which type of permission you are granted.

Subdomains helps in security, because you can host your subdomain in different host/server(by Using CNAME) with different credential.

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