I used to have a couple of blogs, all of them hosted through separate hosting accounts, and I found out that I was paying more than 150 dollars per account per year. Here is my strategy to saving money by installing multiple WordPress sites on single account.
Table of Contents
The Background
I was paying more than 500 dollars a year for my multiple hosting accounts for the blogs. The blogs were not bringing me any money so I had hosted them on basic hosting accounts.
And then I found out that upgrading just one account to a higher grade will allow me to host all my websites there, therefore saving me more than 250 dollars a year.
I had a friend merge all websites into one account and I was happy.
Syntax Error Issues
But the happiness was a short lived one. A few months after I went through the consolidation, the problems started appearing – there were those scary “syntax error in line xxx” messages suddenly appearing. At times I had trouble even accessing my admin site to check the error codes or to delete the problematic plugins.
Eventually all the blogs were down.
New Provider, One Hosting Site for Multiple Blogs
One day I decided I needed a fresh perspective.
The first stage was to find a new provider. After a lot of research, I decided on Web Hosting Canada. I already had a basic account there, so I just signed up for an upgraded version of their hosting service.
Until now, my operations style was to sign up for a domain and then a hosting account where I can host the blog/website. But routing multiple domains to one hosting account and creating multiple websites under that account was all new to me.
But first, I had to create backup copies of the existing blog files including the databases of the websites from the soon-to-be-discontinued service provider.
Uninstalling WordPress
Then I went to the next step: uninstalling the WordPress installation/s.
Under my account’s hosting services, the url of the main account was available and I accessed the cPanel management section through that.
From there, I chose Installatron Applications Installer which showed me the WordPress accounts I have already installed.
I uninstalled the said account/s.
Re-Installing WordPress
Now, to WHC. As mentioned, I already had a website.
I had transferred the other domains from the second provider to WHC, so I installed the first (second, if I count the already installed primary site on the account) WordPress.
This also allowed me to set the user id, password, email etc.,
The important issue was to select the correct subfolder. As I was installing a blog under an existing but separate domain name, I had to create the subfolder with the correct name – the name of the blog.
Once this was done, I was able to use the url/wp-admin to access my blog account.
That was it. It took a few hours to get it done, but so far so good to installing Multiple WordPress Sites on a Single Account.