Hi, I came across this "problem" with hosting at ASO. Please tell me if this is something I should be worried about. I have domainFIRST.com hosted there. They allow unlimited addon domains. So, when I created a new domain account for domainSECOND.com, I realized that they configured it rather strangely. What happens is that the new domain gets created as: domainSECOND.domainFIRST.com (i.e. a subdomain of my first domain). And the actual second domain just points to this subdomain. So, a user will visit www.domainSECOND.com and find everything correct, but that is not how the search engines might see it. Am I shooting myself in the foot. Please advise. I intend to host many more add on domains this way. Thanks Ajeet
A domain has to go to the main account (parked on top) or to a subdomain (domain pointing, or addon domain service). The way you have things configured should be fine with the robots as long as you have a unique site. If you are showing the same thing, you may have problems. If you do park one on top, you should use a mod rewrite to the original account so that you do not get penalized for duplicate content. Hope that clears things up.
It sounds like you are using cpanel? Yes, that is normal and you shouldn't have any problems with the search engines seeing it correctly. In a shared environment, you can have a hundred or more sites sharing the same IP. Your sites will likely have the same IP address so you google will realize this if you try to trade links with each one. Google supposedly red flags links even if the IP is different, but the same range. I've heard that google gives more weight to a dedicated IP, but I don't think anyone outside of google knows for sure.
Hi, As mentioned above, this is absolutely normal and there is no need to worry about. And this configuration is not something that is unique to ASO, it is followed by all the cPanel hosting providers. However, there are other huge pains of addon domains in general. For example each domain will not have seperate account, login and password. There is no seperate cPanel for Addon domains but they do have FTP access for uploading/downloading and/or removing any files that "they" own. They do not have access to anyhing else, except for the directory where their files are located. If for example you have 10 domains, and you want to move 5 domains to some other service provider, moving the content would be a big pain and you might have to move them manually. From your post, I understand that you are planning to add more domain. In that case I would suggest you to look for multi domain hosting option, i.e. reseller option, using reseller plan has other advantage as well: - You can create unique hosting plans for each domain - You can define storage space and bandwidth for each account/domain - Its more like running your own hosting company. - You can create hosting accounts by yourself. - A reseller account is excellent because it helps you stay organized and it gives you a lot of control. Each account can have its own CPanel login and private FTP. In fact, initially I started with shared hosting with addon domains, after adding 4 addon domains, it became difficult to stay organized and I decided to take a reseller account. I hope this helps.