Multiple Domain Hosting

Multiple domain hosting or multi domain hosting is a cost-effective solution for organizations that have multiple websites with their own content. Often, large organizations with multiple product or service niches opt for dedicated domains for each product or service in order to achieve focus. This is especially true if the products or services are not related and/or are established brands in themselves. In such situations, the annual cost of hosting multiple domains can add up to quite an investment on an annual basis. If you are such an organization, multiple domain hosting can considerably reduce your hosting cost.

What is multiple domain hosting?

If you have 20 domain names that you own, the cost of hosting all of them can add up to a considerable amount on a yearly basis. And, when you consider many years’ investment in the domains, this can be quite an investment.

With multiple domain hosting, you take hosting space for your main domain that your primary or corporate website runs on. This becomes your primary account or domain. Once you have done this, you can add other domains to this account and host them as add-on domains on the space you have rented for your primary domain– thereby saving considerably on hosting costs over time.

Multiple Domain Hosting or Domain Forwarding?

Multiple domain hosting and domain forwarding are not the same and perform completely distinct functions. If you have misspellings, hyphenated versions and different TLDs of your domain name and you want them all to point to your main website; you can do this using domain forwarding. By doing this, you ensure than when someone misspells your name or types the wrong extension of your domain name, they still land on your main website. With domain forwarding you have one website that is accessed when any registered variant of the domain name is entered.

With multiple domain hosting on the other hand, the content served on each of the domains is different. Each domain has its own site and they all do not point to your main site. This is especially suitable when you want multiple focused websites without hosting them separately and incurring additional hosting cost for each domain. When a person tries to access the domains hosted on your multiple hosting account, they are taken to separate websites and not to one common site.

How does multiple domain hosting work?

Let us say your company “MyCompany.com” wants to have four additional websites for each of your product offerings. You would then want to have a suit of websites as follows

• MyCompany.com (your primary or corporate domain)
• MyProduct1.com
• MyProduct2.com
• MyProduct3.com and
• MyProduct4.com

You should talk to your hosting provider and either upgrade or migrate your MyCompany.com website to a multiple domain hosting account. If your hosting provider does not offer multiple domain hosting, talk to us about your needs and we can offer the best option for you.

Once you have transferred MyCompany.com to a multiple domain hosting account, you then copy your entire website under this account. Now your main company website is up and running.
You can then add all your individual product websites as add-on domain names under the primary account and copy your individual product websites under this primary account. When you do this, each of your product websites will be assigned a folder.

Under normal hosting accounts, if someone wanted to access product1, they would have had to go to MyCompany.com/Product1. However, with multiple domain hosting, when someone types MyProduct1.com, they will be shown the content of that site instead of having to go to a folder under MyCompany.com.

Advantages of Multiple Domain Hosting

There are three major advantages to multiple domain hosting. Some of these include:

• Shared resources: The operating system, common software, etc., would be shared between each of the sites unlike hosting individual sites where each site would require its own infrastructure.
• Ease of management: Because all your sites are hosted under one administrative account, it becomes easier to manage all the sites in one place instead of managing each site separately.
• Cost saving: You spend a little more on one multiple domain hosting account and save on the cost of hosting multiple domains.

One concern with Multiple Domain Hosting

While multiple domain hosting has many advantages, it is also important to be aware of one concern. Since all your websites share the same multiple domain hosting account, if there is a problem with your primary account or the server where you rent space, it could potentially impact all of your websites.

However, this is a small concern if you take care to partner with a reliable domain hosting service provider like Ballistic Domains who ensures at least 99.9% uptime for your website.