Differences among Sub, Parked, and Addon Domain

What are sub domain, parked domain, and addon domain? What are the differences among them? How will they affect the visibility and search engine rankings of my website? These questions may have confused you for a long time.

After researching a lot on the web and consulting many experienced hosting experts, we worked out the following parts to explain the definitions of subdomain, parked domain and addon domain. Now, move on to learn more about them and know their differences.

Sub Domain

Based on the prefixes added before the primary domain name, the sub domain, also called as the third-level domain, is part of a larger domain in DNS (domain name system) tree structure. It allows you to create various sub-websites with different contents but all within the same hosting account. For instance, the official site of the leading web host BlueHost is bluehost.com, but the company also has established the sub-domains for the blog site which is accessible via blog.bluehost.com, webmail site which is accessible via mail.bluehost.com, job hunting site which is accessible via career.bluehost.com.

In fact, the sub domain is very beneficial and budget-saving for businesses which offer multiple products and services at different locations, for it creates separate URLs and web presences under a main domain.

Parked Domain

The parked domain is a placeholder for an existing website, which means multiple domain names but just one website. Note that unlike sub domain, parked domain is not a unique website, and does not have separate web statistics and content. You only need it when you want more than one domain names to lead to your main site.

To put it simply, the primary domain name of this review site is bestwebhosing360.net, but if you type hostingreview360.com in the address bar of your browser, you will also be led to our website. This is because we assign the second one as the parked domain, so whether you type the .com one or the .net one, you would see the same website.

Addon Domain

If you want multiple domain names pointing to separate websites other than the main site on one account, then the addon domain will be very helpful. It is a fully functional domain that stores the files and content of each separate site in an exclusive folder within your public_html directory, and allows you to have as many websites as you like on 1 account. For example, if you already have the primary-domain.com on your account, then you can also establish the addon-domain.com as the addon domain. The addon-domain.com would be a completely separate website and visitors would not know that it is part of your primary-domain.com account because there will be no reference to the original domain name like sub domain.

Summary

Obviously, the 3 types of domains are totally different. The sub domain can be seen as an extension of your main domain name, the parked domain is a transferring tool to redirect the traffic to your main site, and the addon domain allows you have multiple independent domains on one account. Therefore, just figure out their functionalities clearly, and use them in a right way.