Hosting multiple sites/domains on nginx

Create a folder for your new domain within nginx

mkdir -p /var/www/yourdomain.com/public_html

Fix up the permissions

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/yourdomain.com/public_html
chmod 755 /var/www

Create a simple page to serve

Add the following to /var/www/yourdomain.com/public_html/index.html

<html>
  <head>
    <title>www.yourdomain.com</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Success: You Have Set Up a Virtual Host</h1>
  </body>
</html>

Create and modify the new virtual host config

cp /etc/nginx/sites-available/default /etc/nginx/sites-available/yourdomain.com

Edit the new file and modify the following areas in the server section

listen 80;
#listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on;
root /var/www/yourdomain.com/public_html;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
server_name yourdomain.com;

Enable the virtual host

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/yourdomain.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/yourdomain.com

Restart nginx

service nginx restart