Some ROP students have opted to sign up for paid hosting. If you have a paid hosting account with CPanel management you can setup what is called an Addon Domain. Addon domains allow you to point different domain names to different folders on your account.

For example, I have three sites that I manage, a photography site, a recipe site, and a baseball site. I could purchase three hosting packages to host the sites, but that’s expensive and I would have to use different CPanel interfaces to manage each account. I already pay for one hosting account with 500 megabytes of space. That’s really a lot of space for one small site, so instead of purchasing three hosting accounts I can use the larger account to host all three sites.

So how do I do that? The first step is to create folders for each of the sites. Site folders can be created with an FTP program, Dreamweaver, or by using CPanel’s File Manager (Flash SWF - 367kb). For the sites mentioned above I would create three folders: photos, recipes, and baseball to store the individual site’s files. Then the site files need to be uploaded to the appropriate site folders.

When a user wants to access the sites that are in these folders they would have to type http://robin.robinshosting.com/photos, http://robin.robinshosting.com/recipes, or http://robin.robinshosting.com/baseball. What I really want is to give each of these sites their own domain names. I already purchased three domain names for use with these sites: http://www.photosbyrobin.com for the photography site, recipesbyrobin.com for the recipe site, and robinlovesbaseball.com for the baseball site. I also changed the nameservers at the domain registrar to point to my hosting company. Using Addon domains, a CPanel function, allows me to point my different domain names at the appropriate folders.

Here are the steps:

1. Open CPanel.
2. Click the Addon Domains icon.
3. Type your domain name without the http://www. in the ‘New Domain Name’ box and press the tab key. When you press the tab key the ‘Username/directory/subdomain Name’ box will automatically be filled with the domain name. Click the image below to see a screen capture.
   
4. Change the ‘Username/directory/subdomain Name’ that was automatically filled out when you completed the previous step to the desired folder name. For this example I will use photos. Click the image below to see a screen capture.
   
5. Click Add Domain!

That’s it; your domain name (photosbyrobin.com) will now point at the specified folder (photos) and display the folder’s contents. For example, if a user was to type the URL photosbyrobin.com in their browser the site will appear. You can repeat the process for each domain/folder that you would like to associate. Please keep in mind that it will take up to 48 hours for the domain to propagate.

If you would like to see a demonstration of this process view the Flash movie tutorial How to Addon a Domain (Flash SWF file - 243kb).