Note: Last updated July 23, 2011…
OK, if you aren’t new to this blog, you may have heard me mention once or twice that you can host unlimited web sites with just one hosting account at GoDaddy. However, I haven’t explained how, which is what will be covered in this post. I decided to write this post after sifting through the keywords in Google Analytics and came across “godaddy install multiple wordpress”. Whoever came here using that keyword probably left without the knowledge they were looking for. Hopefully that’s not the case next time.
What Do You Actually Get From The GoDaddy Hosting Package?
I covered the features of the GoDaddy hosting package in a previous post but I will go over it again quickly here.
The package that I often recommend to anyone that is serious about making a start online is the 12 month Linux Deluxe Plan. With this plan you are automatically given a 5% discount for paying the year in advance. The cost would be $79.68 which breaks down to $6.64 per month. This purchase entitles you to a domain name for $1.99 which allows you to own the domain for 1 year. Any additional domains you buy GoDaddy usually charges around $10.00 depending on the type (.com, .org, etc.). The main features of the deluxe plan include:
- 150 GB Storage
- 1,500 GB Transfer
- 500 Email Accounts
- Unlimited Web Sites
- 25 MySQL Databases
- Unlimited Email Forwards
- $25.00 Google AdWords Credit
- $50.00 Microsoft adCenter Credit
- …and more recently, $50.00 Facebook Credit
There are more features, but those are the most important. It’s definitely enough reason to choose GoDaddy to buy hosting from.
Can You Really Host Unlimited Web Sites With GoDaddy?
Although it is a true statement that you can host unlimited sites, there are obviously some limitations. The storage quota, bandwidth quota and databases are shared by all of the sites. It would take a lot of sites to reach the storage limit and if you are at the point where the bandwidth isn’t enough then you are probably getting enough traffic to your site(s) to justify stepping up to some dedicated hosting.
It is also worth mentioning a limitation with the email addresses. Your hosting account has a main domain name attached to it. The rest of the domains are sort of sub accounts. The 500 email addresses belong to the main domain. However, when you buy other domain names you are given an email account with them. Depending on what you are doing, one email address per domain is often enough. There are a couple choices for expansion. You are given some email forwards too. You can create a forwarding email address and when any email is sent to it, the email gets forwarded to the main email address that came with domain (or any email address for that matter). Or you can simply pay for some extra email addresses. But the point here is to keep costs down and not to pay for anything unnecessarily so try to work with what is already included, or even do as I’ve been doing lately, use a GMail email address for each domain.
Sharing A Database With Other WordPress Installations
If you plan to take advantage of your unlimited hosting accounts and go beyond 25 you will be fresh out of databases. What to do? Well, what I do is… I create a database with a generic name and use it for several niches. During the WordPress setup it asks for the table prefix. Give it a unique table prefix and point the installation to the generic database. WordPress will handle the rest. All of the data for the new install will share the database but have it’s own unique tables so it won’t interfere with the other data. No worries because MySQL can handle it, it was designed to handle several requests at once. Also, that is the way WordPress’s Multi User version works, it shares one fat database for all of the blogs. One note of caution though, if you plan to sell the blogs at a later date, it may be best to keep the data in separate databases. You could run some SQL commands to pull the data from the proper tables out so it’s really not a huge deal.
How Can You Stay Organized Having So Many Web Sites In One Account?
It might seem like it would be difficult to keep everything organized because you are dealing with so many files from multiple sites. What I do is create a folder in the root folder called “_sites”. I put the underscore in there so the folder stays near the top of the list when sorted alphabetically. And then within that folder I create a folder for each site. I make the folder name the same name as the domain. Now when I want to add files to any installation I just FTP to the main domain, open the _sites folder and find the site I want to work with and go from there. It’s much easier because you don’t have to handle multiple FTP accounts because normally you would need one per site. Creating the folder isn’t enough to actually have the site pointed to that location when browsing. You have to tell GoDaddy what domain you want pointed where. Follow the steps below to do that.
How Do You Point Domains To The Right Place When Dealing With Unlimited Web Sites At GoDaddy?
First of all you should have purchased hosting at GoDaddy and attached your main domain to your hosting account. Then you should create the “_sites” folder as described above. Then…
- Login to your GoDaddy account.
- Choose the ‘Hosting’ option under ‘My Products’ on the left side.
- Choose the ‘Manage Account’ option under ‘Control Panel’.
- Choose Settings, Domain Management.
- Click the ‘Add Domain’ button.
- Begin typing the domain name in the ‘Domain’ box, it should show up in a filtered list, click on the domain from the list.
- Click the ‘Browse…’ button and locate the folder where you want the domain to point to (likely “/_sites/domain.com”)
- Click ‘OK’.
Now, if you have an “index” file in that folder, or the WordPress installation files perhaps, you should be able to browse that domain and pull up the index file to your site or blog, etc. It may take a few minutes for GoDaddy to point the domain to that folder after following the steps above though. Just hit ‘Refresh List’ on the ‘Domain Management’ screen until you see ‘Setup’ under the ‘Status’ column.
Good luck… any questions, just ask.
April 24, 2008 at 10:36 pm
Hi Keith,
You must have been reading my mind when writing this post. I have not maxed out my db allotment in GoDaddy yet, but your post helped me better understand how to work with databases in GoDaddy.
Do you have any advice on the following?
I currently use WordPress with GoDaddy. The folder is at mydomain.com/blog. Now I want to use WordPress to create a web site (more of a CMS) at mydomain.com.
I figure I will just install a new WordPress in the root folder (mydomain.com) rather than in an extended folder (mydomain.com/wordpress) and use a new database file. Do you foresee any problems with this approach?
Although the blog and web site will have similar content, the posts in each will be written towards different audiences.
Thanks!
April 24, 2008 at 10:55 pm
Hey Tim,
Nope, I don’t see any problems with it at all…that’s pretty much what I would do, except I would probably even use the same db but just give the tables a different prefix. Good luck…
Thanks for stopping by.
May 14, 2008 at 7:06 pm
Hi Keith,
i have a website (jpvazquez.com) with godaddy deluxe hosting. I wanted to host a different site (also using wordpress) in the same account.
WordPress is installed in the root directory, what should i do?
Thanks
Juan Vazquez-Abarcas last blog post..Adios al Brunello?
May 14, 2008 at 7:55 pm
Hi Juan…Thanks for the question….this post gets into how to install another WordPress blog under the same GoDaddy account with a different domain name (closer to the end of the post if you haven’t read the whole thing). However if you want to install a blog off the root, you can simply create a folder called “blog” or something similar and install the blog as you normally would but in that newly created directory.
Hope that helps…if you still have questions, let me know.
Keith
May 14, 2008 at 8:20 pm
Keith,
thanks for the quick response, the part i don’t get is the directory path….
my original site is installed in the hosting root (i think).
I don’t get how to set up the second site.
Thanks
May 14, 2008 at 10:22 pm
Is your second site going to be under an entirely new domain name (but within the same GoDaddy account) or is it just going to be a folder off your main site? for example: http://jpvazquez.com/blog/
I assume it will be for an entirely different domain name if you refer to it as a “second site”. That is covered in this post. You would simply…create a hidden directory in the root of http://jpvazquez.com. Maybe call it “_newsites”. The underscore keeps it near the top. Now create a directory in _newsites called…say “domain_name.com”. Now you can follow the steps above to tell GoDaddy that your root folder for domain_name.com is now “_newsites/domain_name.com”. When a surfer is visiting domain_name.com in the future, GoDaddy will quietly and invisibly point them to http://jpvazquez.com/_newsites/domain_name.com
Hope that clears it up.
p.s. I emailed you as well but I wanted to put the answer here too.
May 15, 2008 at 9:06 am
Keith,
You are the closest I’ve come to any help on this subject and I’ve been digging through godaddy support for the last 24 hours.
My primary domain at godaddy is crookedbrooms.com. I am just in the process of trying to host my blog (diydiva.net) under the same godaddy account. I have suceeded in moving the the blog from wordpress.com to http://crookedbrooms.com/diydiva. I cannot for the life of me get my domain diydiva.net to direct there.
From your post I have set up diydiva.net in the domain manager. For the domain hosting path I first used “diydiva/crookedbrooms.com.” (no quotes, obviously). this gave me a 403 error. I just changed the the hosting path to just “diydiva” without crookedbrooms.com as the domain hosting path, since that is the name of the directory it is in, however now diydiva.net is being directed to the crookedbrooms.com website, not the blog.
I know this is a hosting path error, I just don’t know how to fix it. I’m almost completely illiterate when it comes to proper syntax. Am I missing a step here?
I can’t tell you how much I’d appreciate any advice you have on where I’m going wrong.
Thanks!
May 15, 2008 at 11:24 am
Hi kitliz…thanks for dropping by….I think it might be something to do with URL rewriting…if you try installing it two folder levels deep that might work…I sent you the details by email…
May 15, 2008 at 4:01 pm
Juan,
Did you figure it out? I recently set up a 2nd domain and wordpress blog on my GoDaddy hosting account. It sounds like you may have not moved your 2nd domain over to the hosting account. If not, go to your hosting account, select ‘Hosting’ and then select ‘Managing Domains’ to see a list of other domain names that you have registered with GoDaddy but not yet added to the hosting account. Select the second domain name. When you are asked to name the file path directory, I would do what Keith recommends, which is to add ‘_’ before the name of your domain so that the folder for that domain appears in the top of your directory page when accessing your hosting account. Then, follow the rest of Keith’s steps for redirecting web page users to the correct hosting folder and adding Word Press.
May 15, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Hey Tim…I believe we got it squared away…we got through the specifics by email….
I appreciate you dropping by though and providing some input!
I hope you are subscribed because I have a great contest coming up that you may be interested in. I’ll be discussing a site I put up that is geared towards a specific city so it might be along the lines with the stuff you are doing online with your San Diego site.
Again, thanks for coming by and dropping a helpful comment.
Keith
May 15, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Sounds good. I’m looking forward to it.
Tim from San Diegos last blog post..The Scripps Research Institute is World’s Largest
May 22, 2008 at 11:47 pm
Thx for the tutorial , im just wondering if there is any chance that the sub domain name will stay the same like ” example.com” in the address bar instead of “root.com/_nextsite /example.com” ?
May 23, 2008 at 12:01 am
@Hugh
Yep, it’s all hidden from the end user…you would never know it when browsing that you are viewing a sub folder of a different site.
May 24, 2008 at 10:45 pm
HI, I was reading through your Q/A. I hope you can help me.
I have 1 Godaddy account with a couple domains and the Deluxe hosting package. Everything works fine for the hosting of the domains under that same account I just set them up in the hosting domain management and set directories for each one.
Problem My friend has a seperate Domain registered under Godaddy. I offered to Host her site on my Hosting I set it up under domain management and set up the directories, uploaded (PUT) her site with dreamweaver and all. Site doesn’t come up.
I went to the nameserver on her domain and set it up to the same nameserver IDs that was listed on one of my other domains under the hosting account as it was listed under Custom nameserver.
Am I missing a step?
I e-mailed support to godaddy still waiting on a response. Maybe you can help me faster.
Thanks in advance.
May 24, 2008 at 10:59 pm
@Sean T….
I wish I could help. I don’t think you can take advantage of the unlimited hosting aspect of your account unless the domain is in the same account. I could be wrong though.
If that is the case, your friend can change ownership of the domain to you and you can slide it in your account…I believe it is free but you may have to pay an additional year.
Sorry I couldn’t be more precise.
Best of luck!
June 20, 2008 at 9:11 am
From the Domain Hosting Path list choose
–
I never get this option in my domain managment, just a drop down domain name list, I never see a second drop down for the path. Why does every tutorial on hosting two domains from the same go daddy host account include this but I cannot find such a tab, any ideas?
June 20, 2008 at 11:16 am
Hi Brian…
I don’t know why you wouldn’t have it if you have the Deluxe package (or higher). If you trust me to log in to your account contact me with the contact form.
July 2, 2008 at 6:51 pm
This worked for me kind of. It does send you to that directory, but it just seems like another way of masking the domain. For example if the site is mysite.com it always displays “mysite.com” in the address bar and never something like “mysite.com/pictures” for example. and when you right click on the page you can see that it is in a frame. I would like it to act as an actual domain, is there any way possible to do this?
July 2, 2008 at 11:06 pm
nevermind, I just needed to wait for the masking to go away hehe. It works perfect.
July 2, 2008 at 11:17 pm
…glad it’s working Patrick
July 8, 2008 at 11:58 am
Hi Keith,
I have been following your steps so far as this.
host domain:
httphold.com
created folder _sites then inside that folder created the new domain(s)
dogparvo.info and a few other domains
Went to the point of selecting assign domain to hosting site
chose (domain) dogparvo.info
selected
this is where I am stuck. I have a new box below that says the domain
then underneath that I have a new box which says Sub Domain
If I go to sub domain and put in
_sites/dogparvo.info (I get invalid subdomain)
At this point I am confused. Do you have any suggestions because I need to sort it out and so far have spent hours trying to find something and you are the closest I have found that seems to be nearly there.
thanks
July 8, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Hey Laird,
After choosing Setting -> Domain Management it seems that you might have clicked “Add” next to the Sub Domain option under your main domain.
Instead of clicking “Add”, look near the top, there should be two drop down boxes; one labeled “Domain” and one labeled “Domain Hosting Path”. They won’t exist unless you are using the GoDaddy Deluxe plan (or better).
From there you will choose the domain and then enter the path to the folder you want to point the domain to.
You can easily upgrade your existing account to a Deluxe plan if necessary.
July 17, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Hi Keith,
I recently added another domain name to my deluxe hosting account on godaddy. I’ve read through the whole post and the comments and I’ve attempted to activate the second domain name in the way you explained, but no luck.
The big problem I’m having is I am not able to change the path of my main site to the _sites folder. Every time I try to change it, it just stays on the root folder.
Am I missing something?
July 18, 2008 at 11:40 pm
Hey Keith — First, you rock for helping these people out.
I’m having the same problem as “kitliz” (up above). I own the hosted domain comparesummersales.com and want to direct the domain name craigandkara.com to comparesummersales.com/craigandkara which is a wordpress blog.
In Godaddy I select the domain name craigandkara.com from the list and enter /craigandkara as the directory path. The result loads the root directory of comparesummersales.com instead. I have tried pointing it to a path other than /craigandkara and it works just fine. Is there something I need to change in wordpress?
July 19, 2008 at 11:49 am
@Ivan…I don’t think you’d want to change the path of your main site…that should stay as is…in the main folder. Your main domain is attached to the hosting account which is probably why it can’t be changed.
@Craig…I ran into problems when trying to store my site in that way as well. It has something to do with the way WordPress writes permalinks (I believe) and is related to the settings in the .htaccess file (as far as I can tell). When I created a sub folder, such as “_sites”, and then created folders within that, then all of my problems went away…and plus the sites were more organized.
Thanks for coming by guys and thanks for the comments. I apologize that my responses couldn’t be more informative.
July 19, 2008 at 3:37 pm
thanks Keith, I’ll give it a try
July 21, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Great information. I couldn’t find this on other sites (even Godaddy). Nice explanation. Thanks for it!
July 24, 2008 at 9:59 am
I’m having the same problem Craig is having. I have a wordpress blog installed in the root of bockenhauer.com and another wordpress blog installed at bockenhauer.com/thepeas. I had godaddy economy hosting and had another domain (thepeas.com) forwarding to bockenhauer.com/thepeas. I purchased deluxe hosting and removed the domain forwarding and setup the domain thepeas.com with path /thepeas. After that if i would go to thepeas.com it would load bockenhauer.com.
I tried creating the _sites directory and moved /thepeas folder into it. I updated wordpress config to point to bockenhauer.com/_sites/thepeas. But I got the same results.
Any other thoughts?
July 24, 2008 at 10:02 am
Also – I tested this with another domain i have (aisforandrea.com) which i setup to point to bockenhauer.com/aisforandrea which is just a normal html page and everything worked fine. So it obviously has something to do with a wordpress blog being in the root of the domain bockenhauer.com.
July 24, 2008 at 10:08 am
Also also (sorry for all the posts). I have removed the aisforandrea page for now, so if you go there it’s a dead page. And like I said I turned off the domain pointing and am back to domain forwarding until i figure this out.
July 24, 2008 at 1:14 pm
@Pete…When you say that you updated the WordPress config, are you talking about the wp-config file? You shouldn’t have to do anything with that.
And you want to make the path /_sites/thepeas not bockenhauer.com/_sites/thepeas from within the GoDaddy Hosting CP
Unless I’m misunderstanding, after you change that you should be good…
If I can be of further help…I’ll do my best…
July 24, 2008 at 1:21 pm
@Keith James Lock… Since I had to move the wordpress files from bockenhauer.com/thepeas to bockenhauer.com/_sites/thepeas I had to update the wordpress general settings for wordpress url and blog url since that had changed.
Yes, I did only put in /_sites/thepeas for the godaddy hosting path.
July 24, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Hey Pete….ok I see what you are saying.. makes sense…
Well…it seems that you have done everything that you were supposed to so I’m at a loss…I assume you waited a few minutes before testing? It takes GoDaddy 2-10 minutes to make it happen…it stays in the pending state for that amount of time…
Other than that I don’t know what to say…short of jumping in there myself.
Best of luck
July 24, 2008 at 1:42 pm
@Keith James Lock… I think it has something to do with the .htaccess file. If I clear out all the text in the wp-header.php file and just type in like “test” and go to thepeas.com the wp-blog-header.php file works.
Here’s what the bockenhauer.com root .htaccess file is:
————————————————————————-
# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# END WordPress
————————————————————————-
Here’s what the bockenhauer.com/thepeas/.htaccess file is:
————————————————————————-
# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /thepeas/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /thepeas/index.php [L]
# END WordPress
————————————————————————-
Obviously these got changed back when I reverted back. They had _sites/thepeas for the paths before.
Here’s what my bockenhauer.com/thepeas/wp-blog-header.php file looks like:
————————————————————————-
<?php
if (! isset($wp_did_header)):
if ( !file_exists( dirname(__FILE__) . ‘/wp-config.php’) ) {
if (strpos($_SERVER['PHP_SELF'], ‘wp-admin’) !== false) $path = ”;
else $path = ‘wp-admin/’;
require_once( dirname(__FILE__) . ‘/wp-includes/classes.php’);
require_once( dirname(__FILE__) . ‘/wp-includes/functions.php’);
require_once( dirname(__FILE__) . ‘/wp-includes/plugin.php’);
wp_die(“There doesn’t seem to be a
wp-config.phpfile. I need this before we can get started. Need more help? We got it. You can create awp-config.phpfile through a web interface, but this doesn’t work for all server setups. The safest way is to manually create the file.Create a Configuration File“, “WordPress › Error”);}
$wp_did_header = true;
require_once( dirname(__FILE__) . ‘/wp-config.php’);
wp();
require_once(ABSPATH . WPINC . ‘/template-loader.php’);
endif;
?>
————————————————————————-
I tried changing all the paths in wp-blog-header.php to not have the leading slash cause i thought maybe it was looking in the bockenhauer.com root folder and that’s why bockenhauer.com wordpress blog was loading. But that just made thepeas.com load errors about missing files.
July 24, 2008 at 1:45 pm
@Keith James Lock… Ya, I waited at least 10 minutes. I mean the domain worked but was just pointing to the root domain.
July 24, 2008 at 2:03 pm
@Pete: The RewriteBase for my inner blogs are just:
RewriteBase /
Check that and see what happens… I think GoDaddy will show the recent changes to the .htaccess on the hour
…or…if you have another domain name, try throwing together a quick install of WordPress…it might just be the moving about of the blog that caused some grief…
Get back to me
July 24, 2008 at 4:10 pm
@Pete and @Keith james Lock : Good conversation going. I haven’t been able to spend much time on the fix yet, but I’m definitely having the same problem and will try to figure a fix as well. Thanks for the work you guys, I’ll be interested to find a solution together.
July 24, 2008 at 5:21 pm
@Keith James Lock… Ok, that seems to have worked. I have an older wordpress 1.5.2 blog setup in bockenhauer.com/thepeas/arablog. I set it up to point to aisforandrea.com. I didn’t have permalinks setup and everything worked fine. After i setup permalinks for /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ i can still load the index page but if you try to click on categories or posts, you get an internal server error. A .htaccess file does not exist in bockenhauer.com/thepeas/arablog directory.
I noticed before i set the permalinks the URL bar only showed the domain which is nice but the status bar still shows “waiting on bockenhauer.com”. So my root domain isn’t completely hidden from user view.
Obviously this has to do with permalinks.
July 24, 2008 at 6:42 pm
Ok. I had a test wordpress 2.5 blog installed still so i tried that and everything works perfectly even with permalinks. Also the status bar doesn’t show bockenhauer.com ever. What is weird is that this wordpress blog directory doesn’t have a .htaccess file either. I remember once i setup the permalinks for the other two blogs the .htaccess file was auto-generated every time.
I am going to test creating a brand new blog in a directory in the root of the domain…
July 24, 2008 at 6:56 pm
No .htaccess but it has permalinks? That is weird.
July 24, 2008 at 7:56 pm
I setup a brand new WordPress 2.6 blog in bockenhauer.com/test2 and pointed aisforandrea.com to it. At first it loaded bockenhauer.com but then I changed the blog address URL to http://www.aisforandrea.com in wordpress general settings then everything worked fine. Then I setup day/name permalinks and everything works fine. .htaccess also isn’t located inside this test2 directory either. Not sure what’s going on there.
So I guess that’s where i’m at. I pretty much did the same setup. Maybe my account was messed up with all the turning off domain forwarding and creating the new deluxe account.
I’ll give it another try with my /thepeas directory again and let you know how it goes.
July 24, 2008 at 9:34 pm
I got it to work! I have bockenhauer.com/thepeas pointed to thepeas.com.
Set the domain thepeas.com to path /thepeas. Changed wordpress general settings for blog address to http://www.thepeas.com.
I also made my .htaccess file within the /thepeas directory to the following:
—————-
# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# END WordPress
———————
Which is what I also have for the bockenhauer.com root blog.
So after that I went to thepeas.com and it was trying to load bockenhauer.com/thepeas/thepeas and showed a 404 obviously. So GoDaddy was still reading my old .htaccess file. I waited an hour (apparently GoDaddy reads the .htaccess files every hour after you upload it).
Now everything works with permalinks and all!
July 24, 2008 at 10:27 pm
@Pete…awesome! glad to hear it :)
July 25, 2008 at 7:06 am
So what about the economy plan. Can I redirect somehow?
July 25, 2008 at 11:58 am
@Nikola…
Yeah you can install sites in sub folders than just forward the domain to that folder…
There are 2 options with that…you can have the domain name stay in the address bar and never change regardless of what page they are on or… have it show up as maindomain.com/subfolder and it will change based on where the user clicks.
The first way is the most professional (in my opinion) and is only good for small sites…like PPC landing pages maybe…
Again…just my opinion… personally I would upgrade to deluxe…it’s a much better way to do it.
If you plan to do the domain forwarding, let me know if you have any questions on how to do it
August 13, 2008 at 3:31 pm
http://www.userbytes.com/_sites/seizethepage
I tried this.
I upgraded to deluxe and my main site is http://www.userbytes.com and I setup a directory called _sites and within that dir is seizethepage so it looks like /_sites/seizethepage.
I moved all my blog there from a previous directory of userbytes.com/digerblog/ and I edited my sql file and reuploaded.
Now when I go to http://www.seizethepage.com it instantly goes to userbytes.com
if you go here http://www.userbytes.com/_sites/seizethepage/ all works
http://www.seizethepage.com/wp-admin works too.
I am not sure what the issue is yet.
I went hosting/manage account/settings/domain management
userbytes.com add Setup Primary
seizethepage.com /_sites/seizethepage add Setup
My htaccess
# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /_sites/seizethepage/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /_sites/seizethepage/index.php [L]
# END WordPress
Any ideas?
August 13, 2008 at 3:43 pm
Nevermind …in my haste I failed to do something that I saw in Petes comment
“I setup a brand new WordPress 2.6 blog in bockenhauer.com/test2 and pointed aisforandrea.com to it. At first it loaded bockenhauer.com but then I changed the blog address URL to http://www.aisforandrea.com in wordpress general settings then everything worked fine. Then I setup day/name permalinks and everything works fine.”
I did that too and it now works.
January 30, 2009 at 1:53 pm
well the godaddy pending changes status are a real bothering issue. The account stays in pending change status for ages.
April 25, 2009 at 10:22 am
Hi Keith
I have a very small problem but godaddy can’t seem to give me a stright answer. Bascially I have a one site hosted with godaddy on the main control page it shows up as http://www.site.com and says manage on the right handside the account is a Deluxe Hosting – Linux – Monthly.
Now bascially I just want to add a few more domains but just can’t seem to get it working
What i’m doing so far is going into manage – your domains – add domain
I’ve created a folder called _sites and when i add the domain i point it to _sites/manuals247
site is http://www.manauls247.co.uk
Any help would be greatly appreciated
thanks
April 25, 2009 at 10:34 am
Managed to get it working
good blog keep up the good work
August 31, 2009 at 9:44 am
A year later and this post is still helping people. Thank you! I have been thinking about how I could do this but thought I had to do to a dedicated server. Thanks again for this post.
October 7, 2009 at 4:16 pm
Thank you! You answered my question better than the GoDaddy site did and with clearer instructions!
October 11, 2009 at 6:36 pm
hi, great post! i have a question however, i have purchsed a domain a year back( which is my primary domain ) , i have shifted my website to wordpess which is installed in a folder in my root directory. i want to point my primany domain to this folder. When i try doint it using domain management, my primary domain doesnt come in the list ( it shows other domains purchased by me ) ..what should i do?
October 11, 2009 at 10:05 pm
@nitesh, thanks for the comment…
In that case I would think you would have to make a new domain the primary, then the old primary will show up in the list.
When I did a similar thing in the past, I just contacted GoDaddy and they witched my primary domain for me.. but perhaps it’s an option in tha control panel now, i’m not sure
November 3, 2009 at 10:05 am
Sorry, let me try and word it differently. Is there any way to keep the “add on” domains from being viewable as subfolders on the Primary domain? I’m worried that search engines will see those addon domains as subfolders on the Primary domain and penalize the whole group of sites. Any ideas?
November 3, 2009 at 10:30 am
Hi Dave.. I found your other comment in the spam.. sry bout that..
I worried about the same thing when I first set things up. I read somewhere that it wouldn’t be an issue so I just trusted that it wouldn’t. Since then I have checked which pages were indexed by Google for my main domain and none of my addon sites show up, so I’m satisfied. (plus there is no evidence on my addon domains what the main domain is)
I still can browse to the addon domains (or subfolders) from the main one but as long as there aren’t any backlinks to them they won’t get indexed and will stay hidden (I guess)…
Might be a question for GoDaddy tech support if you are very concerned about it.. but truthfully.. they may not know the answer and just make one up.. perhaps opening a thread in the GoDaddy forum might get some answers from other users. Sorry I couldn’t be of more help.
November 3, 2009 at 12:34 pm
That’s great news Keith, thanks for the update. I’m putting the plan in action, I’ll let you know if I ever run into any problems. Thanks for the great site.
November 3, 2009 at 1:04 pm
What would I do if I wanted to host a friends domain on my hosting play. Could I just point his domain at my name servers then configure to a folder as usual (like godaddy does for domains with other registars) or does the domain (and billing) have to be under my account
Thanks for the great info
November 3, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Hi Dan, yep just change the name servers… my gf points her domains to my hosting acct and it works fine
November 30, 2009 at 8:41 am
Hi. Based on the information provided here, I managed to host multiple websites using GoDaddy’s Unlimited plan. Thanks!
However, I saw a minor drawback here. I hosted http://www.A.com (primary website) and http://www.B.com under 1 account (GoDaddy’s unlimited plan); and have SimpleMachineForum installed on a subdomain (www.forum.B.com). The address changed to “www.A.com/B.com/forum/index.php” on postback of my activities in the forum. My question is – whether I can have the http://www.forum.b.com address intact/shown on any postback activities??
Thanks.
Regards,
JeeShen Lee
November 30, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Hi JeeShen Lee,
I haven’t really setup sub domains or forums a whole lot on GoDaddy but I suspect it has to do with your forum software using the php variable DOCUMENT_ROOT within some of it’s files.. If that’s the case, switching them to SUBDOMAIN_DOCUMENT_ROOT should do the trick. If you find that that is the case, you can use a text editor like TextPad to open all files within the directory and do a mass replace.
Hope this steers you in the right direction!
November 30, 2009 at 9:19 pm
Hello Keith,
Thanks! I managed to do it by changing the “Settings.php” alone. Here’s what I did in the “Settings.php”:
Change: $boardurl = ‘http://A.com/B.com/forum';
To: $boardurl = ‘http://forum.B.com';
Thanks.
Regards,
Jeeshen Lee.
November 30, 2009 at 9:24 pm
@Jeeshen Lee
Awesome, glad it worked
January 18, 2010 at 1:32 am
First of all, thanks a lot for a great help topic. I just bought multiple site hosting plan in Godaddy. so I have one domain http://www.aaa.com and it points to “/” and it is my primary. I made a folder “_sites” and made a folder called http://www.bbb.com and pointed my domain to /_sites/www.bbb.com.
Here is my concern, I can not change the pointing folder of my primary domain so there should be at least one domain in my / folder, right? And I can host other domains under “/_sites”. so whatever I have in a root (/) folder that will be for my primary domain (www.aaa.com) right?
Thank you so much.
Rabin
January 18, 2010 at 1:39 am
@Rabin
- I’m not sure what you mean by: “I can not change the pointing folder of my primary domain so there should be at least one domain in my / folder, right?”
But the answer to: “And I can host other domains under “/_sites”. so whatever I have in a root (/) folder that will be for my primary domain (www.aaa.com) right?” is….
Yes :)
January 18, 2010 at 1:46 am
I am sorry that you did not understand.
What I mean is, When I register in godaddy I resigered for http://www.aaa.com and now the whole hosting folder belongs to http://www.aaa.com and this is my primary domain too. when I go to domain management then I can’ change the pointing folder of other domain but I can’t not change the point folde of primary because there is no edit option for primary.
Here’s the other problem I have.
http://www.aaa.com is a primary domain and it is on (/) folder.
I used IE and browse http://www.aaa.com then I tried..www.aaa.com/_sites/www.bbb.com then I could see the index page of the http://www.bbb.com.
http://www.bbb.com is a different domain and it points to /_sites/www.bbb.com..is there any way I can block the content of one domain so that would not happen.
Thanks
Rabin
January 18, 2010 at 1:59 am
@Rabin: “I can’t not change the point folde of primary because there is no edit option for primary.” < - Sure ya can.. go to Settings -> Change Domain Name
As for your other issue, I worried about the same thing but didn’t find a solution so I gave up and never had a problem with it…
January 24, 2010 at 2:15 am
I found your post too late. I had 7 sites that I wanted to add wordpress to and struggled through the process only to find they didn’t allow adding wordpress to a “free” account. But I had a paid account all along, my domains just weren’t under that account (I had never added them, and nobody ever told me I needed to) Now I’m trying to figure out how to change them from the “free account” status and then use your procedure to
then put them under my regular linux deluxe account. Godaddy is the most complicated site I’ve ever tried to comprehend. I spend hours just to get minor things done. They have the worst instructions ever.
My rant for the day.
Rick Sittel
February 9, 2010 at 10:06 pm
Thank you so much for posting this article. I’ve been pulling out my hair trying to figure out the best way to do this. When you’re working online, you can feel incredible isolated, and I’m glad to know that I’m not the only one out here that thinks like this!
I decided to use WordPress MU to achieve exactly this, but my major issue is slowness. I went with the host that was suggested by http://wp.mu/ and paid for them to do the installation and am severely under with their service and the speed of the application.
I’m in the process of making the WPMU move to GoDaddy, but have heard similar complaints on forums from their customers. GoDaddy’s suggested a virtual dedicated server, which if it provides the level of service that they claim, would be well worth the expense.
My question to you is, have you tried WPMU and if so, do STILL you suggest setting up sites in the way that you have described above?
Also, have you noticed a difference in the speed of each site when you have multiple sites setup in the manner that you have described?
You’ve already been a wonderful help, but any additional insight that you can provide would be wonderful.
February 10, 2010 at 2:09 pm
Hi Tiffany,
I’ve used MU in the past to help someone else setup their site. I didn’t like how it seemed like it so many versions behind the regular WP. I heard talks that the MU will be integrated with the single version of WP at some point so I may revisit it then.
If I understand your question correctly, yes I would use my shared hosting account to host an MU site, just like I would any other site My decision to host on a shared server or not has more to do with the anticipated amount of traffic. If you expect/are getting high volumes then of course, some sort of dedicated server may be a good idea.
The speed of my sites have not been affected by the number of sites added to my shared account.
Anymore questions, let me know. I hope that if you choose a GoDaddy dedicated hosting plan it serves the purpose for you. If you have any questions about it, I’ll do my best to help.
Click Here For GoDaddy Hosting
February 12, 2010 at 2:09 am
Keith,
Great tip! I had been going around with godaddy support and all I really needed was this post. Now it is working like a charm.
Thanks for sharing.
March 1, 2010 at 7:11 am
Hey Keith, quick question for you since your site seems to be the only one that understands what I’m looking to do.
I have a blog installed already and want to help out a friend by installing a second wordpress installation to a sub folder on my hosting account, and then link their domain like you mentioned above.
I have linked the domain to my hosting account and it is working fine, but I want to do something similar to what JeeShen Lee (November 30th, 2009 at 8:41 am ) wanted, but for wordpress. Currently the only thing that seems to be happening is the same thing as domain forwarding w/masking, however that isn’t going to work because I need to be able to have people access the permalinks within wordpress and have it link to their website domain, and not mydomain.com/subdomain/permalink?=33
Any ideas?
March 11, 2010 at 3:18 pm
Hi,
How can I stop the _sites/URL from being indexed by Google? I only want URL to be indexed, especially to avoid duplicate content. Can I add something to the robots.txt of the base url or something along those lines? I have recently noticed that Google has indexed a _sites/URL address as well as the URL itself.
Any help is greatly appreciated!
David
March 11, 2010 at 8:39 pm
@david lawton – that’s all I did (edit robots)… and of course avoid linking to the path from anywhere (including emails)
March 11, 2010 at 8:48 pm
@keith
awesome thanks for the info
do you know what i would put in the robots.txt file? i want to be very careful that i don’t block the direct url from being indexed. i’m guessing the robots.txt would need to occur at the base domain level blocking the _sites directory, as opposed to at the site level. i also went into webmaster tools for the base domain and requested removal of the _sites directory hopefully that will work also.
i did everything i could to avoid linking but discovered that when changing a wordpress url the links to attachments such as images is not updated, and therefore google was able to index the site through this alternative path (for anyone else reading this with the same problem i quickly found a plugin which will allow you to update attachment urls to the new url)
anyway,
March 11, 2010 at 9:03 pm
@david adding it to webmaster tools should be sufficient. However, doing it in webmaster tools, only affects Google.
Adding the code to the robots file of the root site which contains the “_sites” folder will not affect the actual URL from being indexed. Here’s the code:
Disallow: /_sites
… keep in mind it’s case sensitive
hope that helps!
March 14, 2010 at 11:33 pm
Kieth!
Awesome post, man. This has answered every question I have…except one. And forgive me if it’s a simple thing, but while I am experienced with site management/design…SEO/Indexing is not a strong point.
My question is, lets say I have set all 40 of my sites using WP, and the way you have suggested, and somewhere along the line, one of the sites is pulling a lot of traffic, doing very well, and someone wants to buy it from me.
I understand how I can sell them the contents of the site, that is simple.
But if I did that, since Google is indexing from my first (primary)domain, and not as an actual “individual” site, would the person buying it be at a huge disadvantage when they took over the site, hosting it in a different location? And have problems with permalinks, etc? Or am I completely off-base in how that system works?
This is probably easy, but I definitely don’t want to set anything up wrong and then 6 months down the road realize I really screwed up.
Thanks in advance for any info…from what I’ve read so far your site has AWESOME content. Kudos!
Cheers,
~JC
March 15, 2010 at 4:17 am
Absolutely glad this post is still showing up on google as I searched how to set a second site up on my Godaddy account. Very helpful!
As I conquered the quest of setting up an account and running my first wordpress site, I realized it was kinda simple considering I know knowing about hosting a site. Although, I couldn’t have done it without blogs and tutorials of great people who take the time to share their knowledge. Thanks for another great read as I felt clueless as to how to setup a second website on my Godaddy account. blessings…
-one hope
March 15, 2010 at 11:21 am
@JC: I think everything will be fine. I strip off sites from my hosting all of the time to sell and everything stays in tact as far as indexed pages etc. The extra folder, with your sites, in the root is largely hidden from the web (unless it gets linked to and eventually indexed, but that would just mean a bunch of extra files indexed for your root domain).
The important thing to note is that your individual sites get indexed and treated as if they were hosted alone.
The difference between shared hosting with GoDaddy and other hosts for the most part.. is GoDaddy keeps the extra sites off the root while the others keep them on the same level as the root. The advantage with GoDaddy, besides price, is that you can keep them better organized (in my opinion).
Just to let you know as well… In the past, I sold the site that was attached to my hosting account (the root domain). I was able to change out the root domain with another one first, then sell it like any other. So… even the root domain can be pulled with a cpl extra steps.
Hope that helps..
March 15, 2010 at 11:22 am
@Joseph… glad to hear it! Thanks for the feedback!
March 15, 2010 at 9:26 pm
@Keith
Perfect! Thanks for the follow-up. I set up the majority of my sites the way you mentioned with no issues at all installing WordPress, etc.
Now that I know you have done exactly what I was wondering about, I am much more confident about hosting this way.
Appreciate the thoroughness!
Cheers,
~JC
April 8, 2010 at 10:46 am
Thanks Keith. Found this from Google! I’m used to having a bit more control using cPanel, but so far with help from good ppl like yourself I’m getting by with Godaddy…..Cheers
May 5, 2010 at 2:52 am
Hello Keith-
I hope you can help me, I’ve spent hours trying to figure this out, and your blog post is the only thing that has closest to my problem. Here are the major points:
- I originally had my blog, BucksHappening, hosting at angelagiovine.com/blog. I simply forwarded http://www.buckshappening.com to that address.
- I have just upgraded my GoDaddy hosting so that I am able to host more than 1 site. I needed to redo my blog anyway, so I completely redesigned it in angelagiovine.com/Test (thinking this would never be seen).
- When I went into the GoDaddy Hosting Control Center and redirected buckshappening.com to point to the /Test folder, it worked. When you go to buckshappening.com, you are redirected.
- HOWEVER, once you start navigating through the site, you no longer see the buckshappening.com URL. You see angelagiovine.com/Test.
I have tried all that I can think of to try and fix this. GoDaddy is no help at all, they say that because it’s a WordPress issue that they cannot help me. I do not know SQL and have downed my website a few times tonight, necessitating restores.
Can you please, please direct me?
May 5, 2010 at 2:03 pm
@Angela.. if I’m understanding you correctly, it seems it’s behaving as designed.. when doing a simple redirect it will physically change the URL in the browser’s address bar..
but when setting up a domain within the hosted account.. it’s not going to be a redirect per se.. it’ll silently show the new address rather than redirect to it.. hope that makes sense.. doesn’t fix your problem exactly but hopefully gives you an idea where there might be some confusion ..unless of course it’s me that’s confused :)..
I always “test” my blogs locally (on my laptop) so I don’t run into the problem of having “live” tests… but… regardless of where you test, the WP DB will have values of the current domain that all have to be fixed when the blog is installed in it’s proper location. Best way to test probably is to install the blog in the right spot and enable a maintenance plugin..
If you have anymore questions or if you need to clarify some things don’t hesitate..
May 5, 2010 at 6:35 pm
@Keith- Thanks for getting back to me. So the wordpress db is in the right place. Albeit, “Test” wasn’t the best choice in folder names, but nonethless it’s simply a folder in the root. Here is a picture of my root: http://i129.photobucket.com/albums/p240/Angel3248/godaddy1.jpg. “Angelagiovine” is the root, and it is a deluxe godaddy package that is supposed to allow me to host a bunch of sites. So I made the BucksHappening wordpress blog in the “Test” folder, and then assigned the buckshappening.com URL to the “Test” folder, as directed by godaddy. (http://i129.photobucket.com/albums/p240/Angel3248/Picture3.png) Similarly, I put all of the files for “buckscountywinetour.com” in the “wine tour” folder. If you go to http://www.buckscountywinetour.com, you can see that the website works just fine and you never see the url “angelagiovine.com/winetour.” The only difference with BucksHappening is that it is a WP site. I figured it has something to do with the database.
So did I do something wrong? And more importantly, do you have any ideas in helping me fix it? I’d be eternally grateful… Thanks again for responding.
May 5, 2010 at 8:57 pm
@Angela… got ya.. ok.. there’s a cpl things we can try.. first, in your WP admin have a peek at the WordPress Address and Blog Address and make sure they are both “http://buckshappening.com” <– with or without the www
let me know if that does the trick… otherwise we’ll look thru the db
May 5, 2010 at 8:58 pm
..oh.. the settings are both under: Settings -> General
May 5, 2010 at 10:50 pm
WOW. I feel so stupid!!! The simplest thing worked!!! I cannot believe I missed that. I am such an idiot. I CANNOT tell you how much I appreciate you paying attention to me!!!
May 5, 2010 at 11:00 pm
I just tweeted you across @BucksHappening and @BeMeBox (2 of my companies). If there is anything I can ever do for you, you let me know!
May 6, 2010 at 8:08 am
@Angela.. good stuff.. glad it worked :) thanks for the tweets
May 13, 2010 at 4:23 pm
If I have multiple websites with forms will I be able to have form entries sent out to the domain associated emails? I guess I’m thinking that the form mailer is connected to root directory only…. is that wrong… tried to look through godaddy but not clear and I only have one site on there so far – heh heh
May 14, 2010 at 9:25 pm
Hi Leslie… hmmm, it’s been so long since I setup my account.. I kinda recall something like gdform.php or something similar that GoDaddy installs in the root.. I don’t fully recall how it works exactly.. I know it’s standalone so you can likely copy the file(s) to another site, however, I don’t remember how it knows the email address to send the mail to.. maybe try and download the file and open it in a text editor.. it might be as simple as editing a line in the file.. if that’s the case you can likely use it anywhere (on any domain).. and you can probably use the same authentication and smtp details.. any more questions or help u need let me know
May 16, 2010 at 9:53 pm
Hi Keith,
I have a Godaddy Deluxe hosting package. I want to add another domain to the hosting package. You have mentioned in your posts not to link or backlink to the root (primary domain). I’m not exactly sure what you mean by this. For example, I want to put a link in my second website that points to the first website to drive traffic to it and vice versa. Are you saying not to do this because it will cause indexing problems with Google? Thanks.
May 17, 2010 at 7:39 am
Hi Glenn K…
I was just saying it’s probably best not to link to your addon domains in this fashion: “mainsite.com/_sites/addon1.com” and instead link to it like you normally would “addon1.com”…
know what I mean?
try browsing to it: “mainsite.com/_sites/addon1.com” if you have WP installed on it.. you will see it doesn’t open properly anyway.. so linking to it from another page that Google can crawl, and therefore getting it indexed, probably wouldn’t be a great idea..
May 17, 2010 at 9:01 am
Thanks Keith. That makes it clear now. Was worried I couldn’t link to the other sites I’m working on. Happy to know it’s not a problem.
June 8, 2010 at 6:41 pm
Thank you so much i followed everything you said and it is working perfectly first time, i have spent hours trying to sort out my mess that i created trying to work it all out, i wish i had found this post earlier, so helpful! even go daddy had not explain this the amount of times i hae been on the phone to them.
I am so grateful thank you.
Naomi
June 9, 2010 at 3:07 pm
No problem Naomi.. glad it helped :)
June 9, 2010 at 7:20 pm
Keith,
Looks like a very popular blog, I read every post and am a bit confused about the possible SEO implication of using one Go Daddy hosting package, for multiple websites.
The rep at Go Daddy told me that all the sites would share the same IP Address. Is this bad in terms of linking strategy? I have a few clients that I want to create a “network” of sites for their individual services, and for the related services, I would like to link the sites to one another. (not trying to cheat Google, just use all the sites to their fullest)
Also, if all the sites are under the main site “site1.com” – won’t Search Engines look at the other sites as just individual pages of the 1st site since the actual path to access the files will be root/sites/subsite? I place webmaster tools on all sites I build, and also Google Analytics. Will I have a hard time getting all the “sub sites” seen as individual sites if they are sharing the same IP address?
Last Question – will there be a problem with security of my scripts (c# scripts that process my forms. Currently with Network Solutions, these scripts are not accessible, is there a way, with Go Daddy, to place these in a folder that is not accessbile?
I apologize in advance if some of these questions are ignorant, but I am fairly new to building ASP.net websites. I am having success with getting my sites indexed on Google, but am tired of the expensive rates of Network Solutions.
Thank you in advance for your blog and time.
Chad
June 9, 2010 at 11:30 pm
Hi Chad… I will answer your questions the best I can…
As far as linking between sites… it is said that linking from one site to another, having different IP’s is significantly more valuable.. I really only took the word of other people that suggested that, I did not set up any tests myself to verify it. So.. yes, since all sites in your shared account will be on the same IP you might lose some SEO benefit when linking between sites.. I personally setup a few different hosting packages with different providers to get past that.. There are a few that you get a year for less that $100.
I just dbl-checked all indexed pages on Google for my main site and there are no pages from my other sites that have been indexed as sub pages.. however.. I recall someone telling me in the past that they created a backlink to a secondary site via the main site (mainsite.com/sites/subsite1) and the pages for the subsite ended up being indexed as sub pages for the main site.. guess we just have to be careful about creating crawlable backlinks..
Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools will see all sites as individual sites.. no problems there.
I know what ya mean, or at least I think I do, about hiding scripts and preventing them from being browsed… I used to do the same when programming in ASP but it was my Access DB’s I’d keep hidden, rather than scripts.. I’m guessing that’s what you are referring to. I do recall asking GoDaddy about that in the past but I can’t remember the response.. I didn’t end up needing it but I do think it was possible.. it really should be anyways.. seems to be a simple and standard request.. and it could be that it’s setup by default for Windows hosting (I use Linux).. it might be best to give a quick call to GoDaddy support for that one…
June 10, 2010 at 10:14 am
Thanks for your answers. I was thinking that in the case of creating a network of sites – it would probably be best to just play it safe, and buy individual hosting packages. Go Daddy’s “economy” package would work for most small business websites that only seek local traffic (they don’t get much traffic, and definately would not use all the space/trasnfer per month.)
Just to clarify – you are saying as long as you link to the site using the http://www.domain.com you are ok, and the sites will be indexed individually on Google? Just don’t link as http://www.mainsite/site/page and it should not be a problem?
Thanks again….I appreciate the help. It’s kind of scary thinking about switching hosting company’s as I know the directory’s/paths etc for my current provider.
Chad
June 10, 2010 at 11:09 am
@Chad
Yep that’s right…
..and yeah I hear ya, it can be a bit scary.. but what I would do to simplify things is buy the package… put up some test scripts to learn the paths, then move one site over at a time at whatever speed I was comfortable with..
.. and.. you could get a refund if you find it isn’t for you.. but you should probably determine that before moving any sites over :) I don’t suspect you will have an issue with bandwidth/transfer if you are used to hosting in a shared environment anyways… it’s just that it may not be as user friendly as you have been accustomed to.. GoDaddy does have a proprietary control panel.. but I actually prefer it now.. things are laid out very simply IMO
February 2, 2011 at 4:10 pm
How has others gotten around allowing others to update their sites through FTP?
Let’s say you have five client sites where three of those want FTP access to update their individual sites. If you give them the site level FTP username and password, they would be able to jump up a level from their site folder to the _sites folder where they could view the contents of all the other site folders.
Then account for some of those clients not being very observant of the folder they are in, such that they upload their site files to whatever folder they are in, then you got a mess.
Probably the virtual dedicated server option would be the better solution, under this scenario.
February 2, 2011 at 4:15 pm
@nRadiant… no.. just create an FTP user and set them a path to just the web site you would allow them to update..
February 3, 2011 at 3:11 pm
Is there a trick to getting faster FTP upload?
Simultaneous connections seem to be limited to 2 at a time.
February 6, 2011 at 8:06 am
Nice Article Keith.
I was wondering however how hosting multiple sites/blogs on one hosting package impacts the ranking of each domain. Will search engines like Google treat each domain as a separate entity and therefore rank each domain independently ignoring the fact that they are all hosted on the same package.
The reason I ask is that I currently host one of my sites with 1and1 hosting which claims to allow webmasters to host multiple sites under 1 package. I have discovered however that this is misleading as they achieve this through a redirect from one primary domain (attached to the host package) to a subfolder/minisite using a redirect script in the root. From my understanding however, this has implications on the ranking of each site as all ranking is collected by the primary domain and not filtered through to the sub-domains?
Thanks very much.
February 6, 2011 at 12:05 pm
Good question. Each domain will be treated and seen independently on search engines. They will all have their own ranking factors. If one is de-listed the rest will not be.. and so on..
However, just like ever other web sites on the same box ( it’s shared hosting after all ) they will all have the same IP Address.. so interlinking your own web sites won’t have as much as effect as if they were on their own server.
I think what’s going on with the whole “hosting multiple sites with one account” is that the main domain attached to the account gets a new “sub-domain” for each of the add-on domains…. but that’s irrelevant for the most part.. each domain stands on it’s own.. but again, with the same IP as the rest and sharing the same resources.
Hope that helps…
February 6, 2011 at 2:21 pm
Thats cleared that up. Thanks for that.
So, there is an argument for having multiple hosting packages with multiple hosting companies in order to have different IP addresses and therefore rank more highly in the search engines if linking between the sites?
February 6, 2011 at 2:57 pm
That’s correct. Not to say that you couldn’t have different IP’s at the same host.. but basically.. getting some cheap hosting at GoDaddy, LunarPages, HostGator, etc. is what I would do if I were to interlink ;) Now.. getting domains at NameCheap with the free whois privacy is good too so it isn’t obvious all the domains belong to the same person, because of course, the whois details will be private..
February 7, 2011 at 6:22 am
That’s very helpful and I will follow your advice.
Being based in the UK, would my Rankings benefit by using hosts whose servers are located in the UK? (I should mention that my site sell’s a service only relevant to one city and really needs to be optimized for local searching.) Would I therefore be penalized in any way for hosting – say in the U.S?
February 7, 2011 at 10:08 pm
Well.. all things being equal, a UK hosted site (and UK domain) will rank better for UK searches in Google from my understanding.. I don’t suspect you’ll be ‘penalized’ though..
Be sure to specify the UK in the targeted country in Google’s Webmaster Tools…
..and you could set the site up so that different ads show up for different countries, or redirect to different pages for other countries using this geotargeting tool ( shameless plug for my geo plugin/script ) :)