Domain is simply the web URL of a website such as atishranjan.com is the domain for this blog. Domains should be added into your hosting account in order to use them. When you buy hosting, you have to set a primary domain and later when you add more domains in the same hosting, they are called as addon domains.

I am going to show you how you can add an addon domain in your bluehost hosting account however the steps are almost same with all the hosting providers which use Cpanel but this tutorial is based on bluehost. (If you are yet to buy hosting then buy it here and Get a free domain)

Adding an addon domain is very easy task which I am sharing step by step with proper screenshots. Ok so let’s go through the steps to know how to do it:

Log into your hosting account at bluehost

Open bluehost.com and click on login, you will see this screen. Enter your login credentials and hit on Submit button. It will take you to the hosting dashboard.

Open Cpanel

The next step is to click on Cpanel to see all the tools and options available in the control panel. You can do it by clicking “cpanel” menu item.

As long as you click you will see a lot of options out there on the page.

Find Addon domain and open it

Make use of CTRL+F  to find “addon domain” and click to open it.

Here follows the steps:

Step 1: Assign or Add Domain

In the very first step, you need to enter the domain you want to add. As it is the first time you are adding a particular domain so use the option “Use a domain that is not already associated with your account” and enter the domain name without www in the text box.

Step 2: Verify Ownership

As you entered the domain name, the verification of domain process starts automatically, if the domain’s name server is already set to bluehost’s nameservers then it will be verified otherwise it will show options like this:

You just need to use any option to verify ownership, I prefer the first option. Just copy the nameservers of bluehost which are NS1.BLUEHOST.COM and NS2.BLUEHOST.COM and go to your domain control panel and update the nameservers then again repeat the verification process and it will show ownership verified.

Note: If the domain is registered with bluehost then there is no need of updating nameserver as its already pointed to bluehost.

Step 3: Choose Addon vs Parked

The Third step is to choose either the option addon domain, parked domain or unassigned domain. As you are adding this as addon domain so choose Addon Domain option.

Step 4: Create Directory for Addon Domain

The fourth step is to create the directory for the addon domain your are adding.  Tick the option create a new directory and enter whatever directory name you want to create but adding domain name as the directory name itself is the better idea.

One more thing, when you create a directory, there is a sub domain also created for the same.  This is required for cPanel.

Lets understand it with an example, If your addon domain is example.com and you are creating a directory example then the subdomain created will be example.primarydomain.com(Primary domain is the domain which you have added to your account at the time of buying hosting account).

Note: It is a better idea to redirect this subdomain to the addon domain which you can do by going to option “Subdomains” where you can see the addon domain and subdomain listed. There you will find an option to redirect it, use that option and create the redirect.

That’s it! Now you can login to your ftp account using any FTP client like filezilla or cute FTP and locate to the directory you have created for this addon domain. Now, upload your website files within that directory. Now your site is ready to be exposed in front of your audience.

Hope you liked this how to guide for adding an addon domain into bluehost control panel.