What is an Addon Domain?
An Addon Domain is the ability to create additional domain names/websites within the one cPanel account. You can also create email addresses, forwarders, databases and so on, exactly the same as you do for the main domain. These Addon Domains are created as a folder within your main domains public_html folder (main-domain-public_html/addon-domain.com.au)
So what are the Pros for Addon domains?
- Saves Money – You only need to pay for the 1 hosting account.
- Administration – All your websites are under the 1 ‘roof’
So what about the Cons?
There’s actually quite a few:
- Search Indexing – Google and other search engines may index the Addon Domain, so you may see: http://www.main-domain.com.au/addon-domain.com.au listed in Google – there are ways around this though.
- Resources – Cloud Linux allows you a set amount of resources. Each site will consume these resources and may lead to you reaching your limits and therefore slowing your site/s down and even causing time-outs.
- Suspensions – If 1 of your sites is exploited, spamming and so on, your cPanel account will be suspended. This of course includes all Addon Domains.
- Selling – If you decide to sell one of your sites, then migrating that to a separate account will require manually downloading the files and databases, and manually moving the mail accounts.
- No longer using the main domain – If you stop using the main domain, you can’t just close the account, nor can you move an Addon Domain to a primary domain without major headaches and time of manually downloading everything, deleting the Addon Domain, changing the main domain, then re-upload the files to the main public_html folder and of course lose your email in the process.
- SEO – Well this is a grey area, SEO people will say Addon Domains affect SEO rankings, While others including Google will say it doesn’t.
So what’s best for me?
We suggest Addon Domains are suitable for personal accounts, small SOHO, testing environments.
For business sites, we would highly recommend utilising an additional cPanel hosting account instead.
