Would change in hosting domain as an "add on" domain impact ranking?

[nickreynolds]

I have a bunch of sites on one reseller hosting account. It's not used for reselling. The sites are mainly just half a dozen pages each and are rarely updated and have very little off site seo. Most rank reasonably well for local search terms. National or international traffic is irrelevant
It would be much cheaper to move them to hosting where I can have them as add on domains. Would you expect any significant negative ranking effect in having them as add ons compared to being on one reseller account?

[JS_Harris]

As long as the move goes smoothly I wouldn't anticipate too much trouble. A couple of things to watch for...

- The new host will assign a new IP which might cause some temporary ranking fluctuations
- The new host may handle .htaccess rules a bit differently causing some changes to your site

One of the changes you will want to check on is the information the new host displays in the http header area. Get a tool, like the "http headers" addon for firefox, and check to see if things like cache and expiry dates are the same. It's best to run a test page with the new host and check the headers before the switch is live. This isn't a direct ranking issue but it can sometimes affect other things that become a minor issue. I'd avoid any host that doesn't allow mod rewrites as well(mod c), make sure that your urls remain the same.

[aristotle]

What you want to do should work if everything is set up correctly. About three years ago I added two add-on domains to the primary domain on one server, for a total of three in the same hosting plan. So far I haven't had any problems at all.

If you have cPanel, you can do everything yourself in a few steps (fully do it yourself). In the file manager the add-ons become both sub-directories and subdomains. But the server is programmed to show them to the outside world as if they are independent domains. There is some theoretical risk that googlebot could reach the same page through two different paths, but evidently this rarely happens.

In my case I created a separate .htaccess file for each domain, and this seems to work just fine, although Lucy might have something to say about it.

As for SEO, to the outside world the only connection between the sites is that they have the same IP. This could be a consideration in some cases.