Website 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”.

Answer:

You’re talking about two different things.  First you say you want to buy hosting for 10-20 customers, but then you talk about addon domains.

The “add-ons” HostGator is referring to are add-on domains.  When  you buy web hosting, you list which domain name you’re going to use.  This is called the primary domain.  Later on when you want to put more domains on the account, you’d register them at a good registrar like NameCheap, change the DNS nameservers to ns1.hostgator.com and ns2.hostgator.com (if you’ll be hosting at HG), then go into your HG control panel to the Domains section and create an add-on domain using one of those domain names.  It creates a folder on you account with the domain name.  You then publish your website files to the folder.  And like you said, since the add-on domains are on your account, there is only one control panel.

However, if you don’t pay your hosting bill on renewal, your clients lose their websites.  If one of the sites does something to hog server resources, your entire account will be suspended and those of your clients.  Also, HostGator has a 250,000 inode limit. So even though you can host unlimited domain names on a single account and you have unlimited hosting space, you can’t have more than 250,000 files on the entire account.

Any customer of yours who would use your personal hosting account for their website is nuts.  Make the customers buy their own hosting.  That way their are responsible for renewals and their own activities.  They would give you the username/password for you to publish to their account.

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