If you’ve signed up for a Web hosting plan that allows the hosting of multiple websites, each with its own domain name, you will find it useful to know how to add domain names to your account. And this is a must if you followed my advice about signing up for a multi-site Web hosting account and created your account with a generic “umbrella” domain. In that case, you’ll have to add a domain name to your account to start your first actual website.

Adding a domain name to your hosting account is easy if you’ve signed up for a hosting with a company that uses cPanel, as I suggest. Therefore, that’s what I’m going to cover here today.

In tech-speak, adding a domain name to your hosting account is called creating an add-on domain. If you don’t have cPanel, then look for technical support with your hosting company regarding add-on domains (or addon domains).

The first thing you need to do is log into your cPanel account. I just thought I’d discuss it here since creating an add-on domain is possibly the first task you would ever need to do with cPanel, and therefore you may have never logged in yet.

All the information you need to log into your account can be found in the welcome email you’ve received when you signed up for your hosting account, except perhaps the password which you should have kept safe when you first signed up.

The username and password you’ll use to log into cPanel are almost sure to be the same as those you’ve specified when signing up for hosting.

The URL of the login page is usually just yourdomain.com/cpanel or 123.456.789.101/cpanel, where the numnbers are the IP address of your specific Web server, and yourdomain.com is the domain name you’ve signed up with for hosting. For the hosting company Host Gator, this information is detailed in the welcome email as follows:

Until your DNS has been changed and resolved over to our nameservers, you can access your cPanel at:
http://123.456.789.101/cpanel

Once you point your browser to your cPanel’s URL, you’ll be prompted to enter a username and password. You’ll probably either get a login message box similar to the following,

or a login screen that looks like this:

After you log in, look for the “Domains” section of the control panel:

Then, click on the “Addon Domains” icon:

In the screen that comes up you’ll be asked to enter details about the domain you want to add:

Filling out that form is very simple. First, enter your domain name in the “New Domain Name” field. The next two fields, will then be filled out automatically, and the defaults are just fine. The “Document Root” field is the directory in which the website will reside. The other fields on the form, “Subdomain/Ftp Username” and the password fields, deal with FTP (file transfer protocol) access to the new website’s files and directories. But since you can also access those with your main login, i.e. the one you use with cPanel, the FTP username and password are not that important here.

For the password, just click the “Generate Password” and then the “Use Password” button on the box that comes up to create a strong password:

You don’t need to record this password, as you won’t need to ever use it. But it’s important to have something uncrackable there.

After you’re finished with the password, click the “Add Domain” button on the add-on domain creation form.

The next screen will have a massage saying that the domain has been created, but it may take a while for it to appear as cPanel is working on getting everything configured. Just be patient and wait for it to finish.

Once it’s done, you’ll see the following, which means the domain has been added to your account:

If you click on the “Go Back” link, you’ll be taken to the main add-on domain page. Once there, you’ll be able to see your newly added domain listed in the table at the bottom half of the page (click image to enlarge):

And that’s how you add a new domain to your hosting account.