Hosting MANY sites, use add on domains or individual accounts?

Anoninator

Registered
Aug 2, 2011
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Hello,

Our team is working on transferring a few hundred sites from dream host to a dedicated server running WHM and cPanel. We would like to know the best way, in your opinions, of going about this. We are scripting the whole process, making it fully automated using the awesome API (thanks cP, for that one). We have, so far, 250 IP addresses assigned to our pool with plans for adding more in the future. We're going to start out with about 2 sites per IP (this is for an SEO company if you haven't noticed) and perhaps add more sites to each IP over time or acquire more IP addresses.

What I'd like to know is, is it better to have one cP account and just fill it with addon domains, or should we create a separate account via API for each site? One or the other may not be compatible with the way we want to manage our IP pool, so that's why I want your opinions.

Thanks!
 

acenetgeorge

Well-Known Member
PartnerNOC
Mar 6, 2008
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Southfield, MI
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DataCenter Provider
Security is a consideration also. If one account with a lot of addon domains is compromised, all of those websites are compromised. If an account with only one site is compromised, only that account is affected.

It also makes restoring backups easier.
 

cPanelTristan

Quality Assurance Analyst
Staff member
Oct 2, 2010
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somewhere over the rainbow
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Root Administrator
If the domains need mainly dedicated IPs, then you'd definitely want to go with individual accounts. You cannot assign without manual intervention a dedicated IP to an addon domain under the current cPanel implementation for dedicated IP addresses.
 

Anoninator

Registered
Aug 2, 2011
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Two things made my decision: security, and obviously the IP assignments. I figured the addon domains couldn't be assigned IPs directly.

Thanks alot for your help.