Overview
An addon domain is a domain in addition to your primary domain. Every package supports an unlimited number of addon domains, limited only by the amount of storage and bandwidth allotted to your account.
Adding a new domain
A new domain may be added within the control panel under DNS > Addon Domains. There are a couple tunable parameters of interest. First is the domain document root, which indicates from where site content for this new domain will be served.
| Site Root | Serve from a directory within /var/www; in single-user scenarios this is optimal |
| User Home | Serve from a directory within a user home directory; this domain will be managed by a secondary user |
| Subdomain | Serve from a preexisting subdomain, this domain is aliased to the subdomain and vice-versa |
Second, enable e-mail for this domain will authorize the server to handle mail for the domain. If you are using a third-party mail service, this option must be disabled to avoid problems.
Once enabled, visit Mail > Manage Mailboxes to create new e-mail addresses for users on this domain. In certain situations, an e-mail address username may overlap. In these situations, it’s prudent to use a namespacing technique to separate e-mail delivery.
After adding the domain, ensure you have changed nameservers for the domain to our nameservers. Nameserver settings are changed through the company through which you registered the domain. If you registered the domain through our registrar, then this has been done for you already.
Validating ownership
If a domain is already registered and already has nameserver records set to those other than our nameservers, additional verification is necessary. This is to prevent unlawful hijacking of domains and mail routing that would otherwise be disastrous to clients on the same server. Complete 1 of 3 options available to verify that you are the owner.
Addon domain verification error that must be completed before a domain may be added to an account.
Important: there are two caveats with regards to DNS that may take longer to complete verification if done after attempting to add the domain as a consequence of how DNS caching (TTL) works:
- Remember: uploading a verification file is always the fastest option to confirming ownership!
- Changing nameservers to our nameservers after attempting to add the domain will result in a 4-24 hour delay until changes are picked up in the control panel, because there was a positive DNS lookup and its cache duration is dictated by the SOA records present. These are typically higher than…
newacctis looked up as a simple A record (IP address mapping). In most situations, unless your previous hosting provider has wildcard DNS setup, this record doesn’t exist and will fail. A failed DNS lookup has a shorting cache duration (usually between 5-15 minutes). Therefore, validating with anewacctrecord is preferred over changing nameservers.
If for whatever reason none of these options may be completed, some registrars require DNS zone presence before permitting nameserver changes (.br and .ie country top-level domains “ccTLDs”), then open a ticket within the control panel. Explain your situation and we’ll take care of adding your domain to a bypass list.