All About Addon Domains

The Basics

You can have multiple domain names share the space on your cPanel account. It works like this:

Your primary domain, maindomain.com, uses the directory ~/public_html for its website files.
Your first add-on domain, example.com, uses the directory ~/public_html/example.com for its website files.
Your next add-on domain, example2.com, uses the directory ~/public_html/example2.com for its website files.

Create a New Add-On Domain

1. Log in to your cPanel account (http://maindomain.com/cpanel).

2. Click Add-on Domains from the Domains section.

3. Fill in the following information for the blank text boxes:

   • New Domain Name: example.com

   • Subdomain/FTP Username

   • Document root
     Note: These last two should populate automatically.

   • Password: (choose a password)

4. Click Add Domain.

5. Now log in to your cPanel account using FTP and upload the file to ~/public_html/example.com.

Upload to an Add-on or Subdomain

There are a couple of different ways you can upload to your add-on domain or subdomain via FTP.

Option A

1. Open your preferred FTP client.

2. ​Enter the following information to connect:
   
   Host - add-on domain name (in our case example.com)
   User - [email protected]
   Password - what you entered during add-don domain creation
   Port - 21
    

3. Once successfully connected to the root of the add-on domain name, upload your files.

Option B

1. Open your preferred FTP client.

2. ​Enter the following information to connect:
   
   Host - primary domain name
   User - cPanel username
   Password - cPanel password
   Port - 21
    

3. Once successfully connected to the home directory of your domain name upload your files into the add-on domain folder, which is within the public_html folder.

Advanced Tips and Tricks

The username/directory/subdomain name above not only creates the directory 'example.com', but also a subdomain called 'example.maindomain.com' and an FTP user account '[email protected]'.

The FTP user account is useful if you want to give someone access to upload files to the Add-On Domain but don't want to give them your cPanel password. Just give them '[email protected]' for the username and the password you entered above and they can upload files to that directory only.

The subdomain is how cPanel keeps track of which add-on domains belong to which account. When you want to view website statistics (visitors, referring sites, etc), you'll look for the subdomain stats in cPanel rather than the primary domain's stats.

Check out this add-on domains video tutorial: https://cpanel.net/products/trial/#tour.
Also see the FTP articles in our Knowledgebase: What is FTP (File Transfer Protocol)?