Hostmonster can't change domains around?

Posted by loneboat on Pro Webmasters See other posts from Pro Webmasters or by loneboat
Published on 2010-10-28T20:00:34Z Indexed on 2013/11/01 10:26 UTC
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(question imported from http://superuser.com/q/204439/53847 )

Horrible title, but I couldn't think of a succinct way to summarize it to fit.

I have HostMonster for my web hosting. I have several domain names under the same account (using the same web space, IP address, etc...). Every HM account has one domain set up as the "main domain", and all other domains are "secondary".

The only way I have ever encountered this being an issue is in trying to use HTTPS - since (from my limited understanding) HTTPS encrypts headers, you can't route HTTPS requests to different virtual hosts on a server - only unencrypted requests, since it must look in the request to know where to route it.

When I registered for my account, I only had one domain name (A). I have since added domain names (B), (C), (D), etc... At one point I switched domain name (B) to be my "main" domain name - so I could use HTTPS with it. I have since sold domain name (B), and would like to make domain name (A) my "main" one again (as it was before), but HM support says, "no, once a domain name has been a 'main' domain name on an account once, we can't set it up to be a 'main' domain name again. You're welcome to use domains (C), or (D), though.". They tell me the only way to reuse domain (A) as a "main" domain would be to set up a new account and transfer over all my files.

I'm confused here. If I have domains (D), (E), and (F), they say I'm welcome to make one of them my new main domain name, just never (A) again, since I've already "used" it once. Calls to support only reveal that they can't let me do it because doing so would somehow "break" my account.

Can anyone think of any good reason why this should be so? The only thing I can think is that maybe they're using the domain names as keys in some database or something? But if that's the case, that's ridiculous - they need to reorganize their databases!

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