Two Websites with One Hosting Plan

[animepoopy]

I <3 Anime

[Bob Barr]

Hi, I want to make two websites. One is a personal website for friends and one is a professional site for work. Can I do this with one hosting plan since disk storage and bandwidth is unlimited?

For example, I want to have a website AnimePOOPY.com for my personal site. Then I want APUniverse.com for work. I want to only pay for one hosting plan though. Is it possible to buy an extra domain and point it at one of my websites directories? How would I do this? What extra payments would I need to make? Do other people do this? Are there any problems if I do this? I'm interested in signing up with BlueHost if I can do this but I don't really understand it yet. If anyone can give me a nice explanation that would be great. Thanks for the help.

Doing this is known as hosting an add-on domain. Lots of people do it. I currently have four add-on domains on my account. I'm quite sure that many other folks have many more than that.

The only extra charge is $10 per year for domain name registration (unless you have the name registered elsewhere).

[animepoopy]

I <3 Anime

[charlesgan]

addon domain is simple.
go to cpanel, and you will find the addon domain feature there..
add your new domain, and change your domain nameserver (for that domain) to point to bluehost nameserver. wait for propagation, and your domain will be hosted with bluehost.

[broken-fish]

One thing that might be worth noting, is that adding additional domains 'may' mess things up in your www directory. I just added a second domain to my package yesterday, and I didn't like having the new domains directory inside my primary domain directory (I had set wordpress up right in the root of the public_html directory).

Bluehost support was very helpful and quick in helping me keep things organized by providing some code to use in the .htaccess file at the root of the directory.

Now I have a folder for each site in the public_html folder, and when accessing the primary domain, the htaccess file uses Apache's url rewrite method to direct visitors to the folder containing the site. The rewrite code is only needed for the primary domain.

Here's the response provided by bluehost support, which includes the htaccess code:

Problem:

The main domain on the hosting account uses the public_html folder for all of its Web site files. Any addon domains use subfolders inside the public_html folder. In order to also set up your main domain to use a subfolder on your hosting account you will need to set up a redirect in the .htaccess file in the public_html folder so that the server knows that any request for your main domain will be redirected to a subfolder on public_html.

Visitors to your Web site will not be able to tell that your main domain is using a subfolder, they will still see the Web site address as http://www.yourdomain.com/page.html

Solution:

# Bluehost.com
# .htaccess main domain to subfolder redirect
# Copy and paste the following code into the .htaccess file
# in the public_html folder of your hosting account
# make the changes to the file according to the instructions.


# Do not change this line.

RewriteEngine on


# Change yourdomain.com to be your main domain.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?yourmaindomain.com$


# Change 'subfolder' to be the folder you will use for your main domain.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/subfolder/

# Don't change this line.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

# Change 'subfolder' to be the folder you will use for your main domain.

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /subfolder/$1

# Change yourdomain.com to be your main domain again.
# Change 'subfolder' to be the folder you will use for your main domain
# followed by / then the main file for your site, index.php, index.html, etc.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?yourmaindomain.com$
RewriteRule ^(/)?$ subfolder/index.php [L]

[animepoopy]

I <3 Anime

[Bob Barr]

Under cPanel, the Email Manager will allow you to create email addresses to either siteA or siteB.

[animepoopy]

I <3 Anime

[k4satin]

I have just done both of these things as well - created an addon domain, and created a subfolder for my primary domain w/the .htaccess.

Does anybody know if either of these things has any adverse effect on search engine spidering & rankings? I know there are certain kinds of redirects Google doesn't like, but I think rewrites are OK? Any thoughts?

[felgall]

The search engines will know nothing about it. A significant fraction of the web is probably set up that way (particularly given how big a portion of the web is hosted on BlueHost).