A prospective client contacted me yesterday asking whether it was possible to host more than one domain against a BeachyUK hosting package. The answer is yes… and having had a similar question before, I thought it was worth adding a post on this to explain how you can do this using cPanel Addon domains.

cPanel, for anyone who doesn’t know, is a leading Web Control Panel facility, provided by BeachyUK, and many other Web Hosts to their customers. It gives customers a familiar Control Panel to access common functions for their site (statistics, software installation (e.g. forum or blog software), e-mail address setup etc..).

One of the features cPanel comes with is the ability to add Parked or Addon domains to your account (one account per hosting package). This is therefore a completely free way to add additional domains to your account. Sound to good to be true? Well do remember, your account has restrictions in terms of disk space, bandwidth etc.. your Parked and Addon domains will share these limits. You will also find a limit to the number of Parked or Addon domains you can add to your account, dependant on your hosting package.

Parked Domains

This feature effectively allows you to run a single website from multiple domains. This is usually used either:

• For domains you’re temporarily not using (so want to direct the traffic to another of your domains)
  OR – more commonly:
• For alternative domains for your site (e.g. for different extensions). For example, you might be lucky enough own amazon.com, amazon.co.uk and amazonbooks.com. If you wanted these to point to the same site (amazon.com), you’d add amazon.co.uk and amazonbooks.com to your Parked domains in your amazon.com cPanel.

It is worth noting that Parked domains do NOT have their own identity in the sense that a Parked Domain:

• Will redirect users to the main domain (so if amazonbooks.com was parked on amazon.com, typing “amazonbooks.com” in the address bar of your browser would take you to amazon.com, and the address bar would change to show “amazon.com”).
• Do not have separate statistics or log files in cPanel.

Addon Domains

This feature allows you to run multiple domains from a single account, with separated content. The content is held in a subfolder of the main account, but is seamless to the visitor of the Addon domain, to whom it will appear as a standalone site.

To all intents and purposes the Addon domain is a separate domain except:

• You will NOT have a separate cPanel login for the Addon domain, so if you propose to use this feature for friends, family, or Client sites, you will not be able to give them their own access details to a cPanel for their domain. All cPanel actions have to be done using the main domain (domain the Addon domain is added to) cPanel.
• They share a hosting package with the main domain (and any other domains parked or added onto the main domain). This means if the account reaches the hosting package limit for disk space or bandwidth etc.., the main domain, and all parked and Addon domains associated with it will suffer.

In comparison to Parked domains then, Addon domains DO have their own identity in the sense that an Addon domain:

• Will take users to the Addon domain as if a standalone domain (so if amazonbooks.com was an Addon domain on amazon.com, typing “amazonbooks.com” in the address bar of your browser would take you to amazonbooks.com content, and the address bar would remain showing “amazonbooks.com”).
• Do have separate statistics or log files in cPanel, though they need to be accessed from the main domains cPanel.

For information on the number of Parked and Addon domains available with BeachyUK hosting packages, visit http://www.BeachyUK.com/hosting