You should only ever have one active membership (because the membership represents "you" as an individual). Creating or accessing multiple memberships is a violation of our Terms and Conditions of Service. Doing so will cause all sorts of problems and may result in substantial additional fees if we have to step in. If you've already done this accidentally, and for some reason, we haven't detected it, please send us Transfer assistance requests from both memberships to consolidate your accounts onto one membership.
Your membership may have multiple accounts if you wish. Each account represents "a discrete pool of money." That's optional; you need at least one account to use our service, but we never require you to have more than one.
The ability to create additional accounts has no technical effects on your hosting. Provided an account balance is positive, you may create and manage as many assets (websites, domains, databases, etc.) as you like funded by that account.
It is solely a convenience feature that allows you to differentiate ownership of funds and assets, help track/control your spending, and share things when multiple people are involved in a project.
Often, this is done for tax, business, or legal purposes, such as:
- Separating business and personal services
- Segregating expenses if you need to manage services for clients, organizations, etc.
- Tracking how much the assets for a specific project cost
Multiple accounts can also be useful if you have one site that is very active or given to surges and another that must always remain available. If both sites are on the same account and the account runs out of funds, both sites will be disabled. If they are on separate accounts, the busy site can never cause the other site to become disabled.
Therefore, you never have to create a second account for yourself to host an additional site, but you do have that option if it suits your needs.
For more information about setting up services that will be shared with others, see this related FAQ entry.