How to reduce your number of unique websites
Reducing your Unique Websites
The Ruby package and all Business hosting packages can host multiple sites. But, how you add or create a new site can vary depending on what you're trying to achieve. This guide gives some tips to reduce your number of unique websites.
What sites count as unique websites?
Your Primary domain, any Addon domains and any subdomains of your primary or addon domains each count towards your unique websites, as they create a new vhost (Virtual Host) - you can run a totally separate website on your primary domain, any addon domains and any subdomains of your primary or addon domains.
Domain Type | Can host a unique website (counts towards unique websites in your plan) | Can host unique email addresses |
Primary domain e.g. primary.co.uk | Yes | Yes |
Addon domain e.g. secondary.co.uk | Yes | Yes |
Sub-domain of primary or addon domain e.g. subdomain.primary.co.uk or subdomain.secondary.co.uk | Yes | Yes |
Alias domain e.g. alias.co.uk | No | Yes |
Sub-domain of the alias domain | No | Yes |
How to reduce your number of unique websites
Move Addon domains only used for emails to Alias domains
If you are only using an Addon domain for email, you can remove it and re-add it as an Alias domain - this will then not count towards your unique websites.
You will need to remove any Subdomains of the Addon domain before you can delete it (be sure to note their unique Document Root before you delete them if you plan to re-add them once you've added the domain as an alias).
If you have existing email accounts using this Addon domain (or Subdomains) their email files will not be deleted when you remove the Addon domain or Subdomains. Simply re-add the domain as an Alias and recreate the Subdomains (using the exact same Document Root you noted above) and the mailboxes will be accessible again.
Move sites from Subdomains to folders
Every subdomain of a Primary or Addon domain counts as a unique website.
So, you may,for example, have a restaurant with the main site of www.restaurant.co.uk and subdomains for each branch e.g. cityone.restaurant.co.uk and citytwo.restaurant.co.uk
Making each of these separate sites folders under your main site would reduce your unique website count.
You'd end up with www.restaurant.co.uk/cityone and www.restaurant.co.uk/citytwo
