14 DAY TRIAL // The most challenging problem of every webmaster represents the selection of an appropriate hosting provider (service). In many technical articles that can be easily found on the Internet are presented essential details regarding the basic rules of web hosting services selection.
Supposing that you have a web hosting account associated with a single domain name, the next situation may occur: at a later time you want to develop more websites associated with different domain names, you could think that every new domain name bought should have a unique corresponding hosting account, but there are also other possibilities.
In order to optimize the manner in which you manage all of your domain names, you can buy a reseller hosting account or you can choose a common hosting service that provides advanced features for domain names manipulation.
As a consequence, you should always look for a web hosting provider offering hosting plans that allow you to manage add-on domains, park new domains and create sub-domains from the same hosting account without the need to pay supplementary taxes.
If you need to have different domain names pointing to different websites, you must make as many add-on domains as you need. The add-on domains are registered domain names corresponding to independent sub-directories situated in the root of your hosting account. An add-on domain will share the disk space and bandwidth with the primary domain name and will display a different website on any HTTP request and in the visitors browser address bar will always appear the add-on domain name.
After that, you create a new domain name with the DNS (domain name sever) data pointing to the DNS of the actual hosting service. If you do not want to wait 24 hours ore more the DNS propagation over the Internet, an online DNS management service could be used. In the administration panel of your hosting account, you must look for add-on domains management section and select the add new add-on domain option. Here, you must specify the required add-on domain various details (depending on your control panel type).
When the setup process has finished, you will notice that the add-on domain has its own site statistics, FTP manager and more. The advantages of using add-on domains instead of different hosting accounts are: all of your different websites corresponding files are in one place and their management can be performed better (website update, backup) and you save money by consuming the bandwidth of a single account.