Knowledgebase
What is the difference between a Subdomain and an Addon Domain?
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cPanel is capable of hosting multiple websites through the use of addon domains and subdomains. Both addon domains and subdomains work by linking to a folder where a website's content is stored, but there are some notable differences between the two. A Subdomain is like a subfolder of an existing domain. For instance, if you have yourdomain.com, a subdomain for it would look like sub.yourdomain.com. Subdomains are most often used to organize different, large areas of a website. For instance, many websites that have an online store will create a subdomain such as shop.domain.com. The "www" in front of a domain name is a subdomain as well, though by default this will point to the same website as the domain with out "www". An Addon Domain is a completely separate domain name that is not a part of another domain. It is called "addon" because the domain is setup in cPanel in addition to the primary domain. Addon domains are what you want to use for storing multiple, separate websites on the same cPanel account. There is no extra cost to host the addon domain, but the domain name itself must be registered and pointed to the hosting account in order to work. In contrast, creating subdomains of an existing domain does not cost anything. The website content for both addon domains and subdomains is stored in their own folders in the cPanel account, within the public_html directory. Because the primary domain's website is loaded from the public_html folder, it is possible to open an addon domain's or subdomain's website by using the primary domain name. For instance, if sub.primarydomain.com and addondomain.com were setup on a cPanel account, you could open their websites through primarydomain.com/sub and primarydomain.com/addondomain.com, respectively. This is hardly ever an issue, but because addon domains can be accessed in this manner, some people prefer to stick with one domain per cPanel account and own multiple accounts. |










