working with technology

Today there 're many cheap web hosting company, and many of these company offer so-call 'unlimited hosting plan', which means you could host multiple website on one web hosting account. The kind of hosting package often include 'unlimited sql database', 'unlimited email account', 'unlimited ftp account' and most important of all, 'unlimted domain & subdomain'.

How to host multiple website using only one web hosting account?

Host multiple website usually include three steps of configuration:

• domain setup
• cpanel setup
• cms setup (depend on cms, e.g. drupal has native support for multiple website)

Multiple website in subdomain name

Using subdomain to implement multiple website is a common approach, It is used by large website that devide its topic into smaller topic , each with its own subdomain name. an example is

• iniu.net - main website
• oracle.iniu.net - sub-website of article related to Oracle.
• drupal.iniu.net - sub-website of article related to drupal
• ...

This kind of multiple website could be implmented using sub-domain in cpanel.

Multiple website with totally different domain name

It is very common that you have multiple website and each have its own purpose and have nothing incommon. These website domain names are totally different from each other . We could also host this kind of multiple website using only on webhosting account.

Domain Setup

The first step toward multiple website is to setup the domain, We usually get IP address of the machine when we buy web hosting. and the first step is to setup our domain to point to our web hosting IP address. this could be done using ARecord or CNAME.

Cpanel Setup

There 're two applications in cpanel that could be used setup multiple domain hosting

• Parked Domains:is used to park your domain to the web hosting main directory. The parked domain is treated as the our main domain.
• Addon Domain: is used to park your domain to any sub-directory under your main directory.

When your 're using Parked Domains of the cpanel, It means that your other domain will be directed to the main directory of the domain you 're hosting. you could only use multi-site support of CMS (e.g. drupal) to setup and support multi-site feature.

It is best to use cpanel's Addon Domains to park your other domain to a sub-directory of your existing domain, your new domain will be directed to the sub-directory and here you have full control to use any CMS for the new domain as if It has nothing to do with your main domain!

By the way, It is worth mentioning that drupal has native support for multiple website , We could use ONE drupal installation to support multiple website, each with its own enabled module and its own theme, this configuration make it simple to manage and upgrade multiple webiste. but of course , in order to host multiple website using one drupal installation, the parked domains configuration is neccessary!