Multiple Domains Support Hosting Pros & Cons
Most web hosting providers support multiple domain names per hosting account. They also highly advertise this feature to win orders on the market. How to host multiple domains from a single account? What would be the benifit and disadvantage in doing so? We have carried out a list explanation & comparison of this support so you can check how to take this advantage by the best practice.
How to host multiple domains from single account?
The purpose of this feature is to help launch multiple different websites without opening multiple hosting accounts. There's no technical problem at all to support this feature for any hosting service. For linux servers, we need to create multiple "virtualhost" or multiple IIS entries for windows server. It's all about the hosting company policy to allow or not. In order to host multiple domain names for different website purpose, we need to add new domain names to point to different sub directories. For cpanel control panel, it's designed as "add new website". When adding a new site, the system will auto create a new folder using the same name of the domain. Then we can upload files to specific folders to put up new website.
Benefits of multiple domain names hosting
Hosting multiple websites under the same account bring us great convenience and simplified the process of website hosting. The outstanding advantages mainly include following
- Easy website management. You can manage all websites under the same control panel. All website files/databases and email accounts can be all well organized centrally without log in/out from different accounts. Especially for web development groups who always need to test multiple sites at the same time. Multiple domain support is quite essential feature.
- More secure. You just need a single user id/password for your hosting account. In this way you don't have to sign up multiple service and remember different ids and passwords. This greatly reduced potential security issues such as password leaking.
- Less cost. You just need to pay a single account fee which is an obvious advantage comparing to multiple accounts price.
As we see above, multiple domain support is quite important feature and come with outstanding advantages. It's not only good for hosting providers to gain more business, clients will also make full use of the service for better experience.
The Weakness
Security is still the big concern. While it brings people the convenience for multiple sites support, you simply put all eggs into one basket. In case the server is overloaded or being attacked or being punished by ISP etc, all your sites will be affected. Especially when the server is punished by some big groups like google, you're in risk of loosing most online business and you will do lots of work to be friendly again to google.
Multiple support means there're many websites served on the same server. Not just you but also many other clients will put more than one site to hosting account. The final result is heavy loading server is produced and its overall performance is downgraded. For most $1 or $2 monthly service, their servers are heavily oversold in order to be profitable. This is something we should avoid when looking for a high performance service.
How to choose the right service provider?
As multiple domain hosting is supported by most service providers, it's a big chanllenge for us to find the right hosting provider. However, we should always remember the popular saying "you get what you pay". If you just pay one or two bucks for the service then you should not expect $5/mo support. Sometimes, it's very important to know how much you need exactly. For example if you would like to host 5 websites then you can search for 5 support plan directly instead a vague "multiple" term.
There're several leading hosting providers who support exact ammount domain names instead a simple multiple or unlimited. For example Arvixe and Inmotion groups. Their starter plans will tell you the exact domains you can host per account. The most important point is they don't oversell their space in order to be profitable more. Customer support and stable performance are their top concern.