Author: Mitch Keeler

By now, if you have spent any time with your Lunarpages hosting account, you know what a domain name is. It is that thing that helps point people from their location to your web site’s location on the server. Did you know there are many different types of domain name? With subdomains, addon domains, and parked domains - it might be a little difficult to keep them all straight.

Subdomains

A subdomain name points to a sub folder of the primary domain. For example, blog.yoursite.com would point to a sub folder such as /blog under the primary domain of yoursite.com. Its content is separate from the main site so it can act like a separate site though usually it will have some relevance to the main site as you can see above.

Lunarpages also offers you the chance to sign up for a hosting plan with the subdomain option. In this situation you would be picking your own sub domain, and using one of our domains. This often comes in handy when users need to setup or move over a project, without interfering with their current hosting setup (if it is hosted elsewhere).

Addon Domains

An addon domain gives you the ability to host more than one domain from the same hosting plan. Back in the “good old days” you could only do one domain per plan. Back in current times though this has all changed. An add on domain allows you to run a separate web site to your primary domain. When you create an add on domain it makes a folder in your public_html folder and you upload the site content into that folder.

So, basically you are running 2 separate sites, separate content, off one account. The Basic plan and Business plan both come with 10 addon domains included. This does not include domain registration.

You may add it in cPanel under addon domains.

New Domain Name: mynewdomain.com
Username/directory/subdomain Name: name you want for the folder such as mynewdomain
Password: Cpanel password

Ignore any bind errors. If it is successful, you will see it in the addons list and there will be a new subdomain for it under Subdomains.

Be sure to change the nameservers at your current registrar of domains you are adding or parking to the same nameservers as your primary domain is using. The nameservers are given in your critical account information we sent on sign up and as seen in your customer account page panel. Changes take 24-72 hours to propagate.

Parked Domains

Parked domains come in handy when you want to part more than one domain at the same spot. A parked domain is an additional domain that points to the main directory of your account. You can park unlimited domains at no cost on both the Basic and Business plans.

A parked domain will resolve to your primary domain name. Say your primary is domain1.com and you park domain2.com. In the address bar if you type domain2.com it will resolve to domain1.com but in the address bar you will see domain2.com. This is a parked domain.

For more help with domains and getting things configured, make sure to check out our video tutorials:

http://www.lunarpages.com/tutorials/

Hopefully this will open up even more possibilities you had not thought of when it comes to hosting projects on your Lunarpages plan. What are you doing with your addon, parked or subdomains?

This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 2:02 pm and is filed under Issue 2 - September 2007, Tips and Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed . Both comments and pings are currently closed.