Creating a single account when you only need one more site

Most of the time you are not building a network, you are adding one site to a network that already exists. That is a different job from the first big order, and it is worth doing deliberately, because the settings you pick for this one account become the shape of it for years.

Decide three things before you open the form

The form itself takes under a minute. What takes thought is what goes in it:

1. Which address it answers on. If this site needs to look unrelated to anything else you run, it needs its own address from your pool. If it is openly part of an existing brand, sharing is fine and cheaper.
2. Which package it sits on. Pick an existing one. A one-off custom set of limits is a thing you will forget by next quarter, and it makes later comparisons meaningless.
3. Whether it shares an account with something else. One account per commercially separate site. See Network Planning for where that line actually falls.

The fields that matter later

Domain, username, package and address are the four that outlive the session. The username in particular is worth a moment: it becomes the home directory name, it appears in paths, in database prefixes, in log lines and in support tickets. A username that reads like the site is a small gift to your future self. A username like user27 is a small tax.

Everything else on the form can be changed afterwards without pain. Those four are the ones that either need real work to change or leave traces behind when you do.

What to check the moment it exists

An account that was created is not the same as a site that works. Four checks, in this order, and each one rules out a whole class of later confusion:

• The account answers on the address you intended, not on the shared default.
• The document root is empty in the way you expect, so you know nothing was pre-seeded.
• Mail routing is where you want it. Deciding this now is far easier than after the first message goes missing.
• The account appears in your own records, not only in the panel. See Running Your Estate.

Do not point the domain yet

The temptation, once the account is up, is to switch the domain to it immediately. Resist that for as long as the content is not ready. An empty account with the domain still pointing at the old place costs you nothing. An empty account with the domain pointing at it is a live site full of nothing, and it is the version search engines will see first.

The ordering that avoids this is written out in Launch Playbooks: build in place, verify, then move the name.

When one at a time is the wrong tool

If you are about to do this three or more times in a row with the same package, stop and use the bulk route instead. It is not faster only because it saves clicks. It is faster because it removes the chance of getting one account subtly different from its siblings, which is the failure that costs a whole afternoon two months from now. The bulk approach and its own hazards are covered in WHM and Accounts.