The Advantages and Disadvantages of Multiple Domain Hosting

Whether it is for personal or business matters, you are going to need a web hosting company to host your first website. Web hosting is rather straightforward these days and certainly more affordable than it used to be. However, as your website becomes popular and the business continues to grow, there is a good chance that you will need additional sites to effectively market yourself. This would ordinarily call for you to purchase different hosting accounts for each unique site. Now all of a sudden, that low price of $6 or $7 per month quickly adds up and could eventually become too costly for you to handle. Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem - multiple domain hosting.

What is Multiple Domain Hosting?

Whereas previously most companies only allowed you to host one domain per account, the introduction of mini-websites has resulted in a number of providers offering multiple domain hosting, giving you the ability to host several sites under one account. Unlike sub-domains, each domain added acts entirely as its own website, totally independent from the primary domain. While the set up varies from host to host, each domain typically gets its own email and FTP accounts, databases, web stats and more. This type of plan is just like having numerous accounts with different providers with the exception of being able to manage all of your sites from one control panel.

With multiple domain hosting, the provider gives you a certain amount of bandwidth and disk space which is to be allotted accordingly among your individual domains. Lets say that a particular company lets you host five domains on an account with 500 GB of disk storage and 5000 GB of bandwidth. To make sure things are running smoothly, you could choose to allocate 100 GB and 1000 GB equally among all five domains. Furthermore, you could adjust your resources accordingly to meet the requirements of each additional website.

The Upside

Multiple domain hosting is so popular that it has become a regular feature offered by many providers. If you wish to host multiple domains with your existing provider, the company may offer a discount for each new account you purchase. When purchasing a reseller account, you could build several sites for yourself and sell the additional space to other users. There are also a number of hosts that offer “unlimited” domain hosting, giving you the ability to create as many sites as you desire from a single account. .

The Downside

Although it can save you a lot of money in the beginning, hosting multiple domains on a shared server could be very risky. Just think, you’re not the only one who signed up with the provider. While its unlikely that everyone on the server has the need to run multiple websites, there is also a good chance that many of them do. All that extra traffic they generate could have an adverse effect on the entire server and ultimately result in the downtime of your business. If you happen to be attracted by the “unlimited” promotion, be sure to do business with a trusted provider using reliable servers.

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