Biggest Drawbacks of Hosting an Addon Domain in cPanel

cPanel offers a Great utility named as “Addon” Domain and we all know about this option. If you do not know what “Addon Domain” is,
Addon Domain is an option to host multiple websites in same cPanel account, so you do not have to purchase separate hosting account for each New Domain/website you want to start.
So this option generally can save you a lot of bucks.

There are a lot of advantages of using Addon Option of cPanel such as,

  1. You can host multiple domains in same cPanel Account
  2. You do not have to buy separate Hosting for Each Website
  3. Hosting your domains as Addon in same cPanel can save you money as you do not have to purchase separate hosting
  4. You can control all of or most of your websites from same cPanel Hosting Account

But where there are a lot of Advantages of Addon Domains Option, there are plenty of Disadvantages of this “Awesome” Addon Domain Option. Yes, this may surprise you but there are a lot of disadvantages of using this tool.

  1. In Modern Era of Web Hosting Industry, almost every large and or famous hosting provider use different tools to cap shared hosting clients in to their own cages with  limited number of resources per Account to help protect their servers and other server users from Server Resources Abusers. So if a user is hosted on a server is abusing server resources can not harm other users on Same Server. Because he is locked Down in his Resources alloted to him.
    This is an awesome and must tool for shared hosting providers, so that is a bit disadvantage for those who user multiple websites in same cPanel using Addon Domains Option. If you host 10 Domains in same cPanel Account and each website gets around 1000 visits a day, you may run out of your Resources,
    And or, If one of your website is having badly written theme or plugin that can use max number of resources of your account, that can cause issues for your Other Websites too. So One Single Domain can bring all of your other websites Down and cause you a lot of traffic and or a lot of income in other words.
  2. Moving an Addon Domain to its Separate cPanel account is a very tough task, Generally its not possible (there are few tools available to covert an Addon Domain to a separate cPanel Account on Same Server but still there isn’t any official Tool released by cPanel yet). So if one of your website hosted in your cPanel as Addon Domain is Over-Grown and you want to move that Domain to a separate cPanel Hosting/Account and or to a Separate Server, it will be a very tough task. You have to move everything manually, such as mySql Database, Your Files, Folders etc. But you can still miss your e-Mails, your e-Mail Accounts etc (How hard is moving a large website is another task to be discussed later and or in some other article).
  3. Biggest Drawback of having a lot of websites as Addon Domain in cPanel is “Website Hacking”. If you are hosting 10 websites (for example) in same cPanel and hacker hack one of your website, he still can access almost all of your websites/content and your other websites can be compromised too.
    Whatever if you recover that website, still there is possibility that hacker keeps a door open for him and or leave a trojan or a mailer script to send mass spammed emails from your Account. And tracking such file down out of thousands of files hosted in your 10 Addon websites can be very difficult and time consuming. You may needed to download your websites content to your computer and check each of your file and folder. Think how hard it can be to find the exact cause.
  4. If you are hosting multiple websites in same cPanel account as Addon Option and your hosting provider receive a serious Abuse complain about a single website hosted in your Account as Addon and he suspend your Account, all of your other websites will be suspended too along that single culprit.

So if you think, hosting few websites as Addon Domains in cPanel is a Good idea then do not ignore the above given facts.

We discussed almost all the main advantages and disadvantages of hosting websites as Addon Domain, we may have missed a lot of other factors too but these are the exact main disadvantages most of the users suffer nowadays.
It is always better and recommended that to always host your Mission Critical websites on some separate and external hosting account with no linking to its files through any other door.

  • 0 Users Found This Useful
Was this answer helpful?