Howto: host multiple websites using one web hosting account

Over at the historyshareforum, a fellow resource-sharer named Patrick Horner replied in one thread that he’d like to see a brief guide on how to host multiple website using one web hosting account. Well, here’s that guide which could potentially save you some money!

The examples I’m going to give are using Bluehost (and for all CPanel-powered web host interfaces) and Media Temple, as those are the web hosts with whom I currently have accounts and can recommend. It’s a fairly straightforward process:

Bluehost

1. Login to your control panel at Bluehost and scroll down to the Domains sub-section:

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2. Click on Addon Domains to add another you have registered to your current hosting plan.

3. You will be presented with a screen like the one below. Type in the name of your domain and the rest (apart from the password is filled in for you automatically). You are basically creating a subfolder/domain of your webspace that will hold the files for your additionally-hosted domain.

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4. Once you’ve clicked Add Domain and everything has processed successfully, all that’s left to do is to transfer the files as normal via FTP to the director specified in the previous step!

***Note: the reason I transferred my websites from Bluehost to Media Temple was that the former are rather restrictive regarding add-on domains (.com, .net, .org, .us, .biz, .info only) whereas the latter – as with edte.ch – allow any…***

Media Temple

1. Login to your control panel by going to ac.mediatemple.net

2. Click on Add New Domain under the domain to which you want to add another hosted domain. As you can see below, mine are already set up!

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3. On the next screen to appear, type the domain name you want to add to your hosting account. Once that’s done, click the Add an Alternate Domain option – it should also automatically tick the box next to Add DNS Zone.

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4. Unless you have more than one account with Media Temple, there should only be one option in the drop-down box on the right-hand side of the following screen. Select it, then press Next.

5. If there’s no problems (such as not actually owning the domain, etc.) you should just be able to press Next until it is set up successfully. Once it is set up you can use your FTP client to transfer files as normal to the HTML sub-folder of the folder with the domain name you typed in above.

I hope this helps Patrick and others. If any clarification is needed, please request it in the comments section of this post. If you’d rather edte.ch came into your institution to help sort out all this for you, get in touch! 😀