I’ve had the domain name “Bensymon.com” for a few years now and have always used it as a portfolio site. I’ve decided to migrate it from a portfolio focused site to a Wordpress blog platform. Since the beginning I’ve had my hosting through Easy CGI. I think I paid $10 a month for the base tier package and I’d always been satisfied with their service and support. However, I’ve been wanting to experiment with affiliate marketing and I needed to be able to host more than 1 domain on the same account. Easy CGI forces you to buy a separate hosting package for each domain you host through them. Learning that, I decided to shop elsewhere.

There are several companies offering multiple domain hosting on the same account, but I decided to go with Hostgator. The sign up process was simple and I had access to the control panel almost immediately. After pointing my domain to the new Hostgator name servers, I was up and running in about 2 days.

Hostgator offers hosting in a Linux environment and lets you choose from three packages:
1. Hatchling ($4.95 a month) - 350gb of disk space, 300gb of bandwith, 1 domain allowed
2. Baby ($7.95 a month) - 600gb of disk space, 600gb of bandwith, unlimited domains
2. Swamp ($12.95 a month) - 1000gb of disk space, unlimited bandwith, unlimited domains

For my purposes, I decided on the Baby option. It should be noted that the prices quoted are for customers that sign up for multiple years of hosting. A month to month service package at the Baby level will run you $10 a month, still not too bad. The control panel, which I rarely use, is well organized and relatively simple to use. My only complaint is that there is no login available from the Hostgator site.

After having the account for a week, I decided to set up Wordpress and ad a second domain the the account. I’m not a programmer or developer by any stretch of the imagination so I sometimes cringe when I have to create a database or do something that’s not entirely automated. Even though the interface for creating a MYSQL database is not beautiful, it only took me a minute and a half to set it up and in another 5 minutes I had Wordpress installed.

My second challenge was creating an addon domain. I was a little confuse on how this would work and couldn’t seem to figure it out on my own from the control panel. After searching around a bit in the support section of the Hostgator site, I found a link to some Flash tutorials. As a visual learner I find these types of tutorial to be infinitely more helpful than any instructional page, with or without screen shots. So far the Flash tutorials are my favorite part of the Hostgator experience. After watching the tutorial on addon domains it became much clearer how they worked and I had mine up in no time.

There are many web hosting option out there these days. However, if you’re looking for budget hosting and the ability to host multiple domains on the same account, you can’t go wrong with Hostgator.