Domains and Starter Packs

[david111]

I bought the £2.99 per month starter pack with which I got one domain for free

Yesterday I bought another domain ... in fact it cost £10 for 2 years ... I was presented with the option of taking a second starter pack with this new domain.

I did not take this option because I assumed that I could manage my new domain with the first starter pack also. Is this correct?

Or do I need to have a separate new starter pack of £2.99 per month with each new domain I buy from BT?

[dave]

On an account you can have an unlimited amount of hosting packages (£5 or £15, it doesn't matter) and an unlimited amount of domains.

For each hosting package you can only assign ONE primary domain. Assigning the primary domain is what gives you the 'Manage yourdomain.com' link in your account, and access to all the tools, web builders, etc for that domain.

If you want to manage any if your domains as an independent website, as david111 wants to, you need to have a hosting package to go with it. Without a hosting package, all you can do is forward the domain to an existing site and of course use it for email purposes.

You cannot have 2 independent websites with different domains running on a single web hosting package.

[whoknows]

I have a IBP (£5 - got it way before the current offer, sadly!) and a primary domain associated with this IBP.  I then went and purchased three more domains - no issue.

I then set up two more website on the same IBP with 2 of the additional domains!  How?  Create a subfolder in the main site files/folders with the website name, put all your web files (and index file for that site in the sub folder), then go to manage domains and point your additional domain to the sub folder. 

This is not an elegant way of having multiple sites as it doesn't really make best use us of search engines etc...but gives you a second or third site cheaply (I am told you can actually have up to 4 such sub folders and hence sites)  - good for testing before you move to buying a seperate IBP or eShop etc.

I did exactly this and now have purchased a seperate eShop package for the shop website which i ran in a subfolder for a couple of years.  And you can use the additional domains for emails by creating the appropriate alias and routing...

Hope it makes sense and hasn't muddied the waters further....

[spank]

Well I'll be....

Apologies, you can have multiple hosting per account.  Although Whoknows method is the one I have explained earlier it isn't the best due to the way search engines trawl sites but is a method you can use.

[dave]

Indeed you can save some money by setting this the way that Whoknows has mentioned, however the second site will not be a completely independent from the primary domain and the primary domain will still show as the "true" address of the site.

[whoknows]

Actually you can set the address bar to show www.domain.co.uk (or .com), but as you move from page to page the true full address will be shown briefly in the bottom part of the browser as it switches pages.

I have said , this is a good way to test out a site and even run a functioning one until you need to go buy a hosting package and then move the site to the new hosting package...