What are Add-on, Parked and Sub Domains?

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Do you know that you’re not only limited to hosting only one domain for your website? In today’s post, we will explore the three different type of domains: add-on, parked and subdomains, and how each one differs from the other.

What’s the Difference Between Add-on, Parked and Subdomains?

Add-on Domains

An add-on is a domain that is hosted and managed from the main web hosting account that is associated to another website independent from the primary domain name. All files linked to the separate website are stored in a unique folder inside the public_html folder.

To illustrate, say you have a hosting account and the domain name is olddomain.com. A year later, you decided to create an additional website and bought another domain: newdomain.com. What you can do is host the add-on domain (newdomain.com) and register it on the same hosting account as olddomain.com.

Advantage of Add-on Domains:

It allows you to create several websites or host domains in just one hosting account.
It has its own website statistics, storage bins and FTP manager that are automatically updated.

Parked Domains

Use a parked domain when you want a domain to point to your main website. This is recommended when you want to point multiple domains to point one website. So for example, mydomainregistry.com is your main domain but you might also want to register mydomainregistry.net, mydomainregistry.org, mydomainregistry.edu, mydomainregistry.biz, etc. and have them all point to the main website. Parked domains are also commonly used when your domain name is commonly misspelled on search engines.

Advantage of Parked Domains

It increases visibility for your main website through different parked domains.
Visitors will still be directed to your website even if they typed in a different Top level domain that you have set as a parked domain.

Sub-Domains

If you want to create additional websites and organize them under the same domain, sub-domains are the best choice for you. For example, to have an independent blog website with your olddomain.com domain name, you can create a sub-domain blog.olddomain.com. You can actually register as many sub-domains as you like for any of your existing domain names, within the means of your hosting plan’s disk space.

Advantage of Sub-domains