I’m about to move one of my sites to a new hosting company, which allows multiple sites to be hosted on the one (shared) hosting account, using the cPanel “Addon Domains” feature. I have three other sites I would like to move to the same account, but I wondered if there are any disadvantages to doing this? The sites are all very small, very low traffic and very low bandwidth usage, so I wouldn’t envisage any kind of problems with resources.
I usually setup a 301 redirect (to itself) with each addon domain so that the search engines don’t get duplicate content via addonsubdomain.maindomain.com (addons create a subdomain) or via maindomain.com/addondomain (cPanel now allows the usage of folders outside /public_html, and doing so would take care of this anyway).
Other than that, addon domains should work great for small sites.
Have you considered a VPS? That way you’ll have full control and you won’t be affected by any of the other sites on the shared server? I’ve had a recent situation where i’ve had to move from shared hosting because of other sites either having huge bandwidth requirements or just for whatever reason those other sites affecting my performance to the point of downtime 
Thank you. It hadn’t occurred to me that these would effectively be sub-domains. So you’re saying that three addresses would all point to the same page: maindomain.com/seconddomain.com/page.html, seconddomain.com.maindomain.com/page.html and seconddomain.com/page.html? Is a 301 redirect the best way to deal with these, or is there a better way using mod_rewrite?
Excellent - thank you. 
Thanks for the suggestion, but it would be a bit of an overkill. The four sites combined will take up less than 60MB disc space.
I think a VPS might be a bit overkill; a shared hosting account or a reseller account is definitely all that is needed.
I think the biggest thing would be if the sites grow at all, they’re a little bit harder to manage as addon domains than a completely separate account. If you do plan on growing them at all, a reseller account would definitely have it’s advantages.
So you’re saying that three addresses would all point to the same page:
Indeed, that’s how it works. “maindomain.com/seconddomain/page.html” won’t work if you choose to use a folder outside “public_html”.
Is a 301 redirect the best way to deal with these, or is there a better way using mod_rewrite?
I imagine there might be a better/more proper way, but this is what worked fine for my purposes. I’m sure that this is a very common concern and several solutions can be found with a Google search.
I’ve had a recent situation where i’ve had to move from shared hosting because of other sites either having huge bandwidth requirements or just for whatever reason those other sites affecting my performance to the point of downtime
That’s just a sign of poor quality shared hosting (i.e. a host not doing its job right), not a reason to avoid shared hosting in general.
Just a couple of daft questions.
(1) Can I set up e-mail/auto-responders etc. for the secondary domains?
(2) Presumably, things like AWStats will log everything under the main domain - or not? I’ve no idea how these things work. (Does it show? 
)
You can setup email @addondomain.com just fine. I’ve never setup auto-reponders myself, but it’s just an email feature so I’m confident it’ll work as well. Because addon domains double as subdomains for the main domain, AWStats will give you separate reports for those subdomains.
Brilliant - thank you.
I have several addon domains and dont need to do this. I just addon each domain as a seperate entity via cPanel, so I have 1stdomain.co.uk, 2nddomain.co.uk etc, all with their own email addresses
Yes, I understand that’s how add-on domains work, that you can access them directly via the add-on domain name. However, if I’ve understood ldcdc correctly, they are technically sub-domains of the main domain, and can also be accessed as such, hence the need to prevent search engines regarding the three addresses as duplicate content.
If I enter http://www.1stdomain.co.uk.2nddomain.co.uk I get this message “xxxxx is unavailable or may not exist”, so I assume this means the search engines will not find duplicate content
well if your hosting provider uses cpanel and if you have vulnerablities in scripts which you are hosting then it might be possible for your account to be hacked in cpanel because all addon domains is added in public_html folder so you must always keep backup of your websites.
i had suggest you to use dreamhost for hosting as you can backup from another host to yours for more then 10gb or anything from shell without any problems.
Just tried that and get the same result, “xxxxx is unavailable or may not exist”, exactly what I would want