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Multiple Domain WordPress Installs on GoDaddy Deluxe Hosting Plan

A little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing and can lead you to trying to re-invent the wheel. I lost three hours last night figuring out how to install WordPress under two different domains with a GoDaddy Deluxe Hosting plan. I was expecting the setup to behave in one way and when it didn’t, I looked for a complicated solution to a very simple one.

Anyway, setting up multiple domains on a GoDaddy or affiliated server is relatively painless. You will have to upgrade or purchase a Deluxe Shared Hosting account to take advantage of running multiple domains (e.g. example1.com, example2.com) from one shared hosting account. I was upgrading from an economy plan to deluxe hosting, so expect some delay while they upgrade your account. I only had to wait 30 mins but in worst case scenarios this could be longer. Once your account has been set up, do the following (assuming you are in the Hosting Manager interface already):

1. Click Domain Management.
2. Click on Add Domain.
3. Type in the domain you want to add to the account.
4. Select an existing folder to serve as the root for your additional domain OR create a new one to house your sites (this post on organizing multiple folder naming conventions on one shared hosting plan provides a useful approach).

That’s it. You probably have to sit and wait for the DNS changes to resolve but I usually find this happen quite fast. Now you will be able to call example1.com and example2.com from the same shared hosting plan and make it appear they are independent of each other. I suggest copying the welcome.html file to your new domain folder for example2.com. You can then test http://www.example2.com/ to see if all is well and okay and avoids returning a 403 Error.

Of course, in principle, the folder you specified for example2.com should work like the root? This is what I assumed last night when I was trying to install WordPress onto the example2.com folder. I had a WordPress installation exisitng on the primary example1.com root and I had a WordPress install on sub-domain directory. Both worked fine. What didn’t work was installing another WP install on the domain folder I had set up for example2.com. Calling www.example2.com with the WordPress files present reverted to www.example1.com which is not what I wanted.

I will save you the three hours I lost last night trying to figure it out. I spent most of those hours believing it to be an .htaccess file issue since WordPress on the main root directory was rewriting permalinks. So, as I believed the theory to be, the WordPress install on example1.com could technically call example1.com/name_of_example2.com_subdirectory and not know that it should operate as a physical directory. An ugly workaround would have been to uninstall the main WordPress installation and stick it into its own directory on the root folder and delete the .htaccess file. But I’m reasonably sure I didn’t want www.example1.com/blog/ for my permalink structure.

Anyway, this clear article on setting up multiple domains for wordpress on a GoDaddy shared hosting plan provided the very simple solution – edit your wp-config.php file manually.

I suspect there is something preventing me from calling example2.com with a fresh install of WordPress to automatically run the famous 5-minute install. By editing the wp-config.php file yourself, you arrive on page 2 of the 5 minute install and everything seems to be running fine, including permalinks on both example1.com and example2.com. Further testing is needed to see if there are any issues in functionality with plugins on the different installs of WordPress.

All in all, this looks like a sweet solution to hosting one company’s various domains on one account.

In the course of my readings, I came to this post which showed some allegedly shocking behavior on the part of some off-duty GoDaddy support staff and former employees. Of course, there is no way to prove they are who they say they are but it does give an uneasy feeling about using GoDaddy – especially when a lot of the replies appear to be canned, generic ones. But on the whole I am happy with the service product itself although getting your hosting account to have the same functionality as other hosting solutions might take some patience and research, as they use different terminology, put things in different places, etc.

However, with total DNS control and essentially running a linux server, the functionality is there so long as you are prepared to invest time doing the research if you stray from the novice-level services and products the company offers.