Hosting method...

[mat]

Is there any reason why you cant just buy one big single hosting account for say....

mywebsite.com

Then make seperate folders in its directory and have your domain pointing to it for your mini site...

myminisite.co.uk >> mywebsite.com/sites/myminisite
coolminisite.co.uk >> mywebsite.com/sites/coolminisite

etc etc

Why get a reseller account if you can get one large hosting account with unlimited domain forwarding and parking?

Does Google not like this method? Is that why people dont do it...


Thanks,

Mat

 

[monaghan]

No reason why not, however you could potentially have duplicate content issues as your site would appear as domain.com/minisite and also minisite.co.uk

A reseller would give you the flexibility of having each account as a standalone environment making it easier to manage and view stats and such like.

A final comment - generally a reseller account will have less overselling issues than your average "unlimited" hosting account as they would be expecting people to use their resource allocation.

 

[Jeewhizz]

you could mask the URL's, and then put a robots.txt in the main domain.com, so that google only sees the content on the forwarded domain

 

[mat]

Thanks for the answers guys.

I have tested it out with a few domains. You can get awstats to monitor each seperate website folder.

Its been working fine for what I need and the difference is £50 - £100 a year for more hosting space than ill ever need compared to £30 a month for a reseller account.

I was just worried that it might effect Google rankings etc having it running this way but seems to be fine.

Mat

 

[BFTUK]

Mat have you looked at using cpanels addon domain feature?

Just avoid any duplicate content issues by using htaccess: http://www.quickwhois.co.uk/htaccess-for-addon-domains/

 

[mat]

Mat have you looked at using cpanels addon domain feature?

Hi,

Yes thats it and my host now allows unlimited domain addons.

Mat

 

[BFTUK]

You'll be fine with it.

Its just a pain if you come to sell and individual site as you can't give seperate access to the cpanel.

 

[Craig]

The issue that you may run into with a standard hosting account is with the resources that this one huge acct would be consuming. Eg.. Bandwidth, Disk space, backup time, CPU time.. list goes on. This of course is dependant to the hosting company. I would suggest reading their terms. Most "unlimited" hosts often do have limits which you seem to hit much quicker than you anticipated

Much better to have these spread out a bit via a reseller account to combat the above reasons.

 

[BFTUK]

Much better to have these spread out a bit via a reseller account to combat the above reasons.

Almost all reseller accounts use the same server to host their sites, so there is no difference between 'Reseller' and single hosting accounts from this angle.

 

[monaghan]

The difference is often that a reseller account will have a more realistic allocation of resource and you should be able to use it as the intended use for most reseller accounts is to host multiple customer sites (unless you buy a cheap oversold unlimited reseller account, then you'll hit the same issues as described earlier)

 

[Craig]

Almost all reseller accounts use the same server to host their sites, so there is no difference between 'Reseller' and single hosting accounts from this angle.

Many of the resource allocations / limitations that some providers do enforce are on a per account basis. You're really going to limit yourself here if you are say hitting your mySQL user limits or Httpd connection limits for example.

There's also the problem of scalability here. Have you ever really tried to manage an account with 100 addon domains? If you are wanting for example to upgrade a site or transfer a site for whatever reason you will have to do it manually as most CP systems don't allow for individual addon transfers to new accounts. Even adding simple things like a new email account is horrible when you get over 10 domains in the same account, the cPanel management area for this is too limited.

If there's an issue with one the accounts too, some providers, rather than simply disable this addon/parked domain would suspend the entire account leaving you with xxx domains down rather than the 1!

I personally think that a reseller account is the way to go plus with cPanel/WHM you can easily bounce between accounts without remembering each password. I can see why people may think its the way forward, one account for all - it simply drives me potty if there's more than 25 attached to one account!

Craig

 

[BFTUK]

Have you ever really tried to manage an account with 100 addon domains?

No personally i have 3 seperate reseller accounts.

 

[mat]

Thanks for all the info guys,

The point im trying to make here is that if like me you only need to host a few mini sites at a time why pay £30 a month for a reseller account when you can pay for one single large amount of space and bandwith hosting account.

Its certainly saved me alot of money and is all working fine.

If on the other hand I was going to be making alot of minisites/websites I would certainly go for the reseller route.

Mat

 

[afx]

Mat,

You dont need to pay 30 quid a month, you could use RS hosting's base reseller account for 10 quid a month and have 40 full accounts. They are used by a number of people on this board and offer a v good service for what they charge.

 

[monaghan]

Or alternatively go with a company that charges by resource utilisation rather than selling a large space with usage restrictions. From memory, the smallest reseller account we have on the system at present is 200Mb of disk.

If you only want to host a few domains, then the cpanel end user account with a few extra domains in your allocation is fine, I'd not want to push it too far though.