Thanks again!

I have very reputable clients, small law firms, insurance agencies, etc. and they just have modest 10-20 page “brochure” websites. It just seems like it would be economical to have them in my account since they never intend to access them.

I don’t expect that they will do much emailing at all, but thanks for that heads up. I will keep it in mind.

I have also been scouring the web for days to find a good hosting company. Are you comfortable with all three of those you mentioned?

Any pros or cons?

Thanks a million for sharing the benefit of your experience.

The two downfalls of addon domains is the shared ip address. You will not be able to have an SSL certificate for an addon domain, because all the website share the same IP address, dedicated or not, because they are on the same hosting box. You will have to use the Shared SSL for your box for addon domains.

The second issue is if one of those websites does Mass email spamming and lets say the email address that is spamming is blacklisted or blocked. An email address is typically blocked by an IP address. Since the email servers share the same ip address for the hostbox, that means that any emails sent from an email accounts on the webhost will be blocked. But as long as you have reputable clients who don’t do this email spamming then you will be ok.

On side note, some web hosting companies will make you setup a reseller account to host clients Websites. I currently have 3 webhosting companies I work with, Hostmonster, hostgator, and MMhosting. Out of the three companies I host with, mmhosting is the only one to give me permission to host client websites without the need of a reseller account. I have 11 website hosted on my 5.95 a month package, 3 are my clients, the rest are my websites.

If a client wants or needs their own hosting account, for the occasions when a website traffic gets to large for my single hosting account or if the client wants a dedicated IP address for SSL, then I call mmhosting.com and tell them to setup a new account. I then give them the domain name and they transfer all the files for just that domain from my account to the new account. Then I wait a couple hours and the website is transferred and live without any problems.

Again before you add an addon domains on to your hosting account, I highly recommend asking permission from your webhost to host additional domains that you do not own, so your account isn’t suspended and your websites don’t all go down.

If you want to you can also read one of my older reviews on the webhost I use, go to http://howbits.com/mmhosting-hostgator-hostmonster-short-review/

I think I understand what you have said about Add-on domains, and I would just like to obtain some clarification. I have many clients who don’t know anything at all about websites, and would like me to handle everything. They don’t want access to the site, and they want me to update all content.

I wondered if I could just create those as add-on domains in my hosting account. It would save on purchasing a separate hosting account for small sites that no one but me will ever access.

However, I want to be sure I don’t damage their changes of being ranked as highly as possible in the search engines.

If these add-on domains are not linked to my parent domain as the developer, and then DNS resolves the domain name directly to this sub-directory in the hosting account, will the sites be ranked with the same independence, and effectiveness etc. as if the website had been set up in its own web hosting account.

In both cases it would be without a dedicated IP address, since shared hosting does not offer that anyway for separate accounts unless purchased. and then that is only really necessary for commerce sites, which these are not.

Any insight on this would be great — I don’t want unnecessary expense — however, I don’t want to compromise SEO for any of my clients.

Thanks!

So lets say http://www.first.com is your primary domain name. Then second.com is an addon domain. Even though you can access second.com website by going to http://second.first.com or http://www.first.com/second.com/ search engines will not index it. They will always see the domains as separate entities. This why you will not see http://www.first.com/second.com/ in search engines, it will instead, index it as http://www.second.com and see it as it’s own unique website.

Whenever a search engine sees a folder attached to a domain name it knows that it is a separate website and not a folder of the primary website.

Not to throw another wrench into the equation, but the true limitation of an addon domain is if you are making an Ecommerce website. The primary domain can have an SSL that looks like https://www.first.com, but the addon domains have to use a Shared SSL Certificates which look messy in my opinion. It usually looks like https://(computer box name).(Web host).com/second.com
Example – https://mars.mmhosting.com/second.com which looks.. messy. The other down fall is, if you don’t have your search bot restrictions correct, search engines WILL index a shared https://mars.mmhosting.com/second.com as ANOTHER new website, even though it displays second.com as a secured website.

If you have any more questions or comments please feel free to reply back.

Djames