An add-on domain is a second, fully separate website hosted on the same cPanel account.
An add-on domain lets you run another website, with its own domain name, inside the hosting account you already have. To visitors it looks completely independent. Behind the scenes it shares the same server space, bandwidth and resource limits as your main site.
For example, say your main site is bakery.com and you open a second business called cateringco.com. Instead of buying a second hosting plan, you add cateringco.com as an add-on domain in cPanel. It gets its own folder, its own email addresses and its own SSL certificate.
How an add-on domain works
When you create an add-on domain, cPanel does three things:
- Creates a folder for the site's files, usually inside your home directory, such as /cateringco.com.
- Sets up the web server so requests for that domain are served from that folder.
- Lets you create email accounts, databases and DNS records for the new domain.
The domain itself must point at your hosting, either by using your host's nameservers or by setting an A record to your server's IP address.
Add-on domain vs subdomain vs parked domain
These are often confused:
- Add-on domain: a different domain with different content, such as cateringco.com.
- Subdomain: a section of an existing domain, such as shop.bakery.com.
- Parked domain: an extra name that shows the same content as your main site, such as bakery.net showing bakery.com.
Pick an add-on domain when you want a genuinely separate website.
Pros and cons of add-on domains
Add-on domains are cheap and convenient. You manage everything from one login, pay one bill and run one set of backups.
The trade-off is that all your sites share one account. If one gets a traffic spike or is hit by malware, it can affect the others. They also share limits like disk space and inodes. For a busy shop or a client site, a separate account is often the safer choice.
Common add-on domain problems
- Site shows the main website: the domain points at the server but the add-on wasn't created, or the files went into the wrong folder.
- "Website not found" error: the domain's DNS still points at the old host.
- SSL warning: the certificate hasn't been issued yet because DNS wasn't pointed when the domain was added.
AblePage's Growth plan hosts up to five websites, and Premium and Elite host unlimited sites, each with free SSL issued automatically.