[General] Addon Domains / Parked Domains

We have had a couple of requests come in lately confusing parked domains and addon domains. The aim of this entry is to help clear up this confusion.

• Parked Domains – Sometimes called pointers or pointer domains. With a parked domain, you are essentially making two domain names go to the same website. For example, say you have a webhosting account with the domain name mydomain.com, but you also own the domain name mydomain.net, you may want to have both domain names go to the same website, in case of user error (.com vs. .net). In this example, you would park mydomain.net on top of mydomain.com. This also carries over the same directory structure so going to http://mydomain.net/sales will take you to the same webpage as mydomain.com/sales. Parked domains are a one time $10 charge.

• Addon Domains – These allow you to split your webhosting account up into multiple website. You essentially use the space on your webhosting account to host multiple websites. For example, if you have a webhosting account with the domain name animals.com and you want to add 2 other domain names to your account, cats.com and dogs.com. With an addon domain, you give each domain it’s own DocumentRoot. You might set cats.com to have a DocumentRoot of /home/animals/public_html/cats and you might set dogs.com to have a DocumentRoot of /home/animals/public_html/dogs. This means that when someone goes to http://cats.com they will get the directory structure as it is laid out at /home/animals/public_html/cats and when someone goes to http://dogs.com they will get the directory structure as laid out at /home/animals/public_html/dogs. Addon domains are an extra $1 per month per addon domain.

Addon Domains are similar to having two completely separate webhosting accounts, except the cPanel and FTP for each account is shared. This means that you will want the same individual to maintain both website, because you would not want to give out cPanel details to a stranger and let them have access to all of your other hosted domains.

Scott