Hi Chrissy,
Let's recap your aims:
In the end I would like to have a host account and several prarent portal with unique urls. I am developing sites for a marketing firm and it think it would be easest in the end to do them all in the same program off a host site.
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There's got to be one Main firm that's the master of the rest? Let's use that hierachy as a way to set it up. The Main Firm as the Parent and the rest as Children. Don't worry... =) They will have their own Aliases(Urls). which means you could have
www.mainfirm.com,www.nextparent1.com,www.otherparent.com,www.lastparent.com for the supposed 4 portals you are going to create AND they won't know the other exists.
if so, then maybe all you need to do is to: (Assuming you are NOT running the database on a separate server)
1) install DNN on GoDaddy. If you go Custom, save everything you've written down. like Hostname settings and all.
2) Log in. If you went with auto. use host|dnnhost
3) Change both Host and Admin passwords in User to secure your environment
4) Go to Host|Portals create new Portals for the rest of the Sites in the Marketing Firm.
or the other method is to just have an empty host, which i would suggest for general marketing/advertisements and then create the rest as parents,
I hope i've been clear enough for you. I 'm not sure what your level of understanding of DNN is so i'm trying to balance it out. =) Ask if you have more questions!