Managing multiple web sites on one host account - advice needed

usignuolo

I run three niche websites which have quite low traffic. They were set up at different times on different service providers because I wanted to be able to update them all quickly and directly.

However they are now costing around 100$ each a year for the hosting service and I am not convinced this is justified.

I see on one of the hosts that I can have up to 10 domains. It is not made easy to use because they want you to buy more space from them, but they have confirmed I can load more than one site onto my space if I have enough spare room for them all.

What concerns me is the updating.

I have developed the sites using a webbuilder software tool, not direct in html. It has an automated ftp interface which I configure to update my site. It is linked to my customer account.


How would this work with three different sites on the same host?
would I have to change the interface each time I updated a different website?

Also how would I ensure that all three sites were equally accessible from the web and not find that two of them might sit "underneath" the index leading to the first one. (Which is what happened when I set up a second blog within my wordpress account - possible in theory, difficult to make work in practice).

Anyone got any experience of this?

kwikbreaks

I don't know about your html generating software but if your hosting supports multiple domains it should be no problem at all on that side of it.

You'd have each site in its own directory within the webspace and assuming you have cpanel or similar you'd use that to specify just which domain is where.

You'd then point the DNS for each of your domains to the IP of your webhosting.

chunter

WS_FTP software allows the saving of multiple ftp accounts. These save the ftp login details (and default directories) for each website. I believe I have about 40 accounts on my WS_FTP. It's a drop down menu. just pick one and it'll show a split screen with the host directory on your pc and on the other side the remote directory.
(Question is a bit vague, best i can do i'm afraid)

cheshirestu

Basically it depends how techie and confident you are. Moving hosts is relatively straightforward (especially if they are simple sites not involving databases). If your host is not playing nice with releasing domain names then you may need to go Nominet (.uk names) to take back control or Internic (if they .com names)

WhiteChristmas

To answer your updating concerns, there are two possible solutions.

If you've got your sites as separate files in Kompozer (or whatever package you're using) then you could combine them into one and set the program to "upload updated files & pages only" in the options. If you'd rather keep them separate then all you need to do is make sure each page has a unique name and not the defaults applied by the program - site1index, site1page1 - then they won't overwrite when you upload to the same webspace.