Web Hosting Reviews & Ratings

February 13, 2009

Multiple Domain Hosting : What You Should Know

Multiple domain hosting is a major draw on the web hosting market.  As the name implies, this type of web hosting allows you to host more than one domain on a single account.  Such an arrangement is particularly beneficial for someone with a need to run numerous websites.  Multiple domain hosting offers cost efficiency as you can easily manage all of your sites from a single interface while paying a fixed monthly cost for one account.  Although the advantages are obvious, the disadvantages may cause you to think twice about multiple domain hosting.

How it Works

Multiple domain hosting is a relatively simple process.  For the most part, you are simply adding on domains to your original account.  In this type of scenario, the additional domains are tied in with your primary domain despite having their own domain names and URLs.  From the web hosting control panel, you can individually manage all of your domains and have the ability to create email accounts, upload files and install software specific to those websites.

Disadvantages

The greatest disadvantage of multiple domain hosting all boils down to one thing - performance.  For instance, if you are hosting five domains and they all become popular and experience a lot of traffic, you may find that your websites run sluggishly.  You also run the risks of exceeding your monthly bandwidth as the traffic for each site will feed off a single allotment.  If this occurs, visitors will have limited access to your site, leaving you with no choice but to purchase extra bandwidth at additional costs.  This is a significant drawback that outweighs all the money you will save with multiple domain hosting. You can avoid this problem by investing in a more robust hosting solution.  With VPS and dedicated hosting, you receive guaranteed resources and can generally host multiple domains without too many enduring performance issues.

Finding Multiple Domain Hosting

While there are a number of companies that offer multiple domain hosting, some only allow you to purchase one domain per account.  If want to run additional websites, you will be required to pay extra for each account.  A true multiple domain host will you allow to host several domains for one low price.  Some will let you host a certain number of domains while others offer unlimited domain hosting.  Keep in mind that even though you may have signed up for unlimited domain hosting, it is not practical to host too many websites at once, especially if you are operating on a shared server.  This will ultimately lead to the issues of bandwidth and performance mentioned above.

Conclusion

Despite the drawbacks, multiple domain hosting offers a great way to operate numerous websites and save money at the same time.  The key is finding a web that offers enough disk space and bandwidth to effectively host multiple websites.  Although it isn't recommended to host too many sites on a single server, a reliable platform gives you a better chance of doing so without suffering from performance issues.

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