Primary Domains

This is the main domain of your cPanel account. Your primary domain is served from the public_html/ folder within your home directory. Your home directory is the directory you see when you first connect using FTP (e.g. a file located in your home directory at public_html/mypage.php would be served to the world as http://myprimarydomain/mypage.php)

Parked Domains

A parked domain is an alias of your primary domain. For example lets say you have a primary domain name attached to an account as 'smithelectronics.com', and you wish to point multiple domain names such as smithele.com and smithsele.net back to smithelectronics.com. This would look like the following:

smithselectronics.com - Primary Domain
smithsele.com - Parked Domain
smithsele.net - Parked domain

This is useful if you want to have multiple domain names serving the same website. Email addresses within cPanel may also be setup for parked domains.

Before you proceed with adding a new parked domain you will need to ensure that the domain is registered and it is pointing to the PANTHUR nameservers which you can find in your welcome email. Once you park a domain on your cPanel account, then both your primary domain and the parked domain will serve the same website. To add a parked domain, log into cPanel and select 'Parked Domains/Aliases' icon under the 'Domains' tab.

Addon Domains

An addon domain is a domain name that points to a sub directory within your hosting account, but when people view the domain, it appears as a separate website. This is useful if you have multiple different sites but want to host them within one account for ease of administration. A common question we're asked is if users can 'see' if an addon domain is somehow linked to a 'primary domain name', short answer - no, to give you a better understanding of how addon domains work please view the example below:

Lets say you have a domain name called 'smitheselectronics.com' as your primary domain name attached to your account, you then wish to host another website called 'johnscarpet.com' - each site having independent content between the two:

smithselectronics.com - Primary Domain
johnscarpet.com - Addon Domain

The addon domain will now have the ability to serve it's own website, e-mail addresses, forwarders, databases and FTP accounts, all while being administered under the single cPanel account shared between both the primary and the addon domains. To add an addon domain, log into cPanel and select "Addon Domains" icon under the 'Domains' tab.

Sub Domains

A sub-domain is another fully functional site with its own unique content, it functions completely independantly from your main site, however a sub-domain is prepended to the primary, parked or addon domain of your choice. For example:

smithselectronics.com - Primary Domain
blog.smithselectronics.com - Sub Domain
jobs.smithselectronics.com - Sub Domain

Users will generally create sub domains hosting different sections of their website, eg. blog, shopping carts, membership portals and more.

To add an sub-domain, click the 'Subdomains' icon in cPanel under the 'Domains' tab and follow the instructions on the page.