Creating multiple websites on one hosting plan

I’ve been doing my $39 blog launches for a while, have had a lot of satisfied customers (and just check out my testimonials! Good shit!) and have gotten a lot of really positive feedback. When I do those launches, I like to use GoDaddy for the hosting, and for the $39 price, I require that people get GoDaddy’s “Deluxe” hosting plan. (And if I’m not setting up a blog for someone and they ask me about GoDaddy, I still strongly suggest the Deluxe.) The reason is that not getting the Deluxe is retarded.

Stick with me here.

I recently re-released my free blog launch e-book (you see it there in the sidebar with the blue cover) and changed the process so that instead of recommending GoDaddy, it recommends HostGator. (This had nothing to do with GoDaddy’s quality. They just kept changing things around and I was tired of updating the e-book… so relax if you have GoDaddy. They’re cool.) In the e-book, I recommend getting the “Baby” hosting plan, because not getting at least the Baby plan is retarded.

You want a hosting plan that allows for multiple domains. Let’s face it, website hosting has gotten stupidly cheap, so you’re paying a maximum of about ten bucks a month to have literally as many websites as you’d ever want on one hosting plan, without paying an extra nickel. So just get an unlimited plan already.

I’m going to draft a tutorial for this shortly that will show you in painfully simple detail exactly how to do this… like my iContact tutorial. (Or maybe it will be a video; I’m not sure.)

For now, here are the basics:

The below examples assume you already have one website rolling and just want to add a second.

ADDING A SECOND WEBSITE IN GODADDY
1. Log in to your account at GoDaddy and register the new domain name you’d like. You do this by going to “Register Domains” under the “Domains” tab in the green nav bar along the top. MAKE SURE YOU LOG IN TO YOUR ACCOUNT BEFORE REGISTERING THE NEW DOMAIN NAME!
2. Once you’ve finished registering the new domain, choose “My Hosting account” under “Hosting” in the green nav bar.
3. When your hosting account comes up, click “Manage account.” A new window should open.
4. Click the big “Your domains” button along the top of the new window.
5. Find the silver “Add Domain” button to the right, almost all the way to the top of the screen. Click it.
6. In the pane that opens, type in the new domain name you just registered, without the “www” at the beginning. Then, in the field that says, “Folder,” enter a name for a new folder to contain the domain. Personally, I just drop the “.com” and use that. Be sure to leave the “/” at the beginning. So for example, if I was using “cars.com,” I’d call the folder “/cars”.
7. Click the orange “OK” button. You’re technically done at this point.
8. But to add the site files, use the same FTP information you’ve been using to send content to your current site except that this time, you’ll be putting files in the new folder you created above. So if my first site was bob.com and I’d been using bob.com as my FTP hostname, I’d still use bob.com as my FTP host and would log in using FTP in exactly the same way but would now put my cars.com files in that new “cars” folder I created.

ADDING A SECOND WEBSITE IN HOSTGATOR
1. Log in to your HostGator control panel. You’ll find this info in the welcome email HostGator sent you. It’s also described in my blog launch e-book if you downloaded that.
2. Along the very top, there’s what looks like a search field, but it says “Register” above it. Use this to register your new domain name. Do not just go to HostGator and register the domain… YOU MUST BE IN YOUR CONTROL PANEL!
3. Once you’re done with that, return to the main screen of the HostGator control panel and scroll down until you find the “domains” section. It’s about 2/3 of the way down, below “Security” and above “Databases.”
4. In that section, click on “Addon Domains.”
5. Enter the domain name you just registered in the “New Domain Name” field.
6. The rest of the important fields will likely be filled in for you after you do that, but if they aren’t, just put the domain without the “www” or the extension (“.com”) in the subdomain/username box. So if I entered “cars.com” in the top box, I’d enter “cars” in the second. Then, in the “document root” box, enter “public_html/cars.com”, but of course put your own site in there instead of “cars.com.” Then pick a password and click “Add Domain.
7. You’re technically done at this point.
8. But to add site files, use your FTP program as such: In the “host” box, enter your new domain name. Then use the new username and password for that domain that you chose in step 6 above. So in my case, the username I chose was “cars.”
9. In contrast to the GoDaddy explanation above, you won’t have to put your files in any special folder. Just put them where it takes you when you log in using your FTP program. (This is actually just because you’ve already been taken to the correct folder automatically.)

In both cases above, GIVE THE NEW DOMAIN NAME TIME TO PROPAGATE. If I register sitename.com right now and immediately try to set it up and send files to it, it probably won’t work. New domains need time to “propagate” throughout the internet, and that time can range from 5 minutes to two days. An hour or two is typical, but sleep on it if nothing happens right away.

Questions? Leave them to comments so that I can answer them publicly for everyone!