Domains as directories at a hosting company

Hosting company using smartstart.cgi for managing domains.

[HeyJim]

Anyone know anything worth knowing about this type of hosting arrangement?

My control panel has the usual options you'd expect for setting up multiple domains and managing them, but to my surprise when I ftp in to one of the sites I find all ten sites listed as /directory.com/public_html , for instance. All ten sites are set up as directories. I guess the hosting company is using a redirect?

I'm thinking the search engines couldn't care less about this kind of hosting arrangement and it won't hurt the serps for any of my sites but I'd like to know a bit more before going any deeper in to this.

[McKracken]

Actually if you have just one server for all of your domains it is the only way. There is no redirection, but the Apache is servin the appropriate content for the domain according to httpd.conf

It is the only, and the best way :)

[py9jmas]

The webserver needs to be able to map URLs to filenames. How it does this mapping is a problem for the webserver. Search engines etc don't care, since they don't know. The mapping takes place on the server - filesystem information should not leak out to the public since the public have no need to know.

What you see is just the convention the IPS has chosen for its servers.