Hosting Add-on Domains

Question:

I would like to start a SMALL web design business where I intend to buy hosting for maybe 10 or 20 websites for customers that won’t have a need to have their own Control Panel. Most hosting sites seem to have pretty cheap hosting plans where you can host “Unlimited Domains”. It sounds like this would be all I need, as long as I didn’t need each website “owner” to be able to have their own control panel, because I think there would be one Primary domain (my web design company’s domain) and all the other websites I host would be “add-ons”.

At least this is what Host Gator told me.

Assuming you understand what I’m looking to do, do you agree that one of these cheaper hosting plans that off hosting for unlimited domains would be all I need (usually they are about 5 – 8 dollars per month)?

And if anyone could elaborate on exactly what “addons” are, that would be great. I just need to make sure that if one of my customers has the domain www.theirwebsite.com and it’s one of these “addons” in my hosting account, they will still be able to get to the website by typing “www.theirwebsite.com” into any web browser. I’m a little fuzzy on the downside of “addons” (if any)

Answer:

Yes, a HostGator account can do that.  However, if I were a client of yours, I would absolutely insist upon buying my own hosting account.  What happens if you go insolvent and you don’t renew your account?  There goes all of your clients’ sites because you didn’t pay the hosting bill.  What happens if one of your clients’ websites hogs server resources and your hosting account gets suspended?  That means ALL activity on your account stops, including email.  What happens when HG says your account is starting to use too many resources and now they want you to upgrade to an expensive VPS or dedicated hosting solution and you can’t afford it?  (They do that a lot.) Just saying.

Here’s how it would work for what you want to do.

• You would spark up a new HostGator account with a primary domain name, yours.
• All your client domain names would be purchased cheaply at a registrar like NameCheap.
• Change the DNS nameservers on those names to point to the HG nameservers.
• Go to your HG control panel and create an add-on domain for each of those names.  Let’s say one of them is client01.com.  Creating the add-on domain creates a folder for it:  public_html\client01.com  You then publish their site’s files to that folder.
• Yes, when you type client01.com into the browser, it will resolve to their site.

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