Knowledgebase

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 - example@maindomain.com
   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 'example@maindomain.com'.

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 'example@maindomain.com' 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.