Hosting multiple domains

Hey, folks... I am considering Dreamhost as a new web host, since I'm having issues with my current provider. What I'd like to do is host several domains from one relatively small account. I am a technical person, and want 2 domains for myself (different sites). However, I also will be running 2 vanity sites for non-techie friends.

While these users won't need to login to the control panel (I'll be the sole geek involved), I'm curious if any users on this forum are doing something similar. My current host is pretty bad at handling multiple domains, so I'm dealing with quite a bit of workaround-itis getting things going on their site. How painful is it to host multiple sites, with multiple domain names, on a single account here? The sites will mainly be used for email / email forwarding, hosting images for eBay auctions, a professional image and text portfolio, and a couple of vanity blogs. Anyone having success (or trouble) with this setup here?

Thanks for any feedback...

DreamHost is a great host for hosting multiple domains. You can choose exactly how the domains should be handled; as a seperate website, mirrored domain, redirected domain, subdomain, etc.

You can run the domains under your master account, and if you want, create accounts for your friends with access to e.g. creating email accounts, etc.

Lots of customers are running a setup like this...

In reply to:
How painful is it to host multiple sites, with multiple domain names, on a single account here?

Handling multiple domains/sites on DreamHost is about as easy as it gets.

You can administer all domains using a single panel log-in (or WEBID), or create new WEBIDs and give them various panel privileges.

The same thing applies to FTP/SSH log-ins, you can have all domains under the one FTP user, or you can have each domain under a different user.

I should note that each domain (and sub-domain) has its own web accessable directory where you place the files for that particular site.

Overall, the DreamHost system really is very versatile.

Mark