Multi Domain – The “Trendy Clothing” of The Shared Hosting Industry

Posted By: Dimitar A. April 14, 2006

The Multi Domain hosting have become popular in 2005 when overcrowded shared web hosting market needed something fresh to attract customers’ attention. It brings VPS model to shared hosting by allowing someone to host more than one website on a single web hosting account.

To be able to offer Multi Domain hosting hosting companies have to run a software that enables web server to be configured to associate different directories with the separate domains on a single hosting account. The mail server also needs to be configured to allow processing the e-mail for each domain name added to Muti Domain account.

You can find some articles that say Muti Domain is the same as Reseller account. That’s not just like that even both can have similar functionality. The main difference is that Reseller Account requires a hosting software that offers client side account management and reseller side control panel. The Multi Domain plan is intended to bring together a few web sites that someone maintains on a single hosting account.

Let’s say you have 5 websites and pay $55/year on web hosting for each of them. Then Multi Domain is a good choice to reduce costs. You can find a hosting provider that will allow you to hosts those 5 sites on a single account by charging for example $120/year.

Offering Multi Domain capabilities to shared hosting looks like big loss of money for web host. Why do they allow their customers to host 5 or 10 domains on one account if they can charge for each of them? That’s because they might loose you as a customers forever.

I manage at least 5 web sites and I’m looking forward to reduce my costs. It is better for a hosting company to offer me a Multi Domain plan instead of spending time and money or launching a Reseller hosting software. I don’t need to resell hosting services. It is not my business but I would be forced to go for a Reseller, VPS or even to get a Dedicated Server if I need to pay $50/month or more on web hosting.

Bringing Multi Domain plants to life “saved” the shared hosting market choked up by thousands of newcomer hosts offered “huge amounts” of space and bandwidth and gave the industry “fresh start”.

Multi plan is definitely not the best solution for siteowners who manage multiple websites. It is a good idea to become familiar with the Terms of Service of web host that offers Multi domain hosting before sign-up. Ask them if there are restrictions and what are they. Sometimes is better to pay few bucks more to be sure you receive a reliable service.

Some web hosts offering Multi Domain hosting (alphabetically):

Bluhost, Host Color, Lunarpages, Powweb, Webintellects, etc.

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About the Author

Dimitar A.
Dimitar is founder of the global Cloud & Infrastructure Hosting provider HostColor.com & European Cloud IaaS company RAX. He has two Decades-long experience in the web hosting industry and in building and managing Cloud computing infrastructure and IT ecosystems. Dimitar is also political scientist who has published books "The New American State" and "The New Polity". "The New American State" is one of the best current political books. It is focused on the change of the American political process. It offers a perspective on how the fourth industrial revolution, also called the Digital Revolution and Industry 4.0, marks the beginning of an era of deterritorialization.