Subdomain hosting - Kayako eSupport Help Desk Software

10 Sep 2010

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	Subdomain hosting

Article We are often asked for "free" subdomain hosting. Below is our interpretation of subdomain hosting.

There is plenty of confusion in the web industry as to the term "subdomain". Here is my description and interpretation of subdomains & of course aliases.

1. Aliases. Client wishes to have a single site respond to multiple names. For example: in IIS (which is the web management portion of windows hosting) we create a site, www.chinookwebs.com, well we would like the site to also respond to www.chinookwebs.ca and also blog.chinookwebs.com. This involves us adding a A record in the dns (domain name system) and then adding a host header into IIS. For the above services we do not charge extra unless there are more than 3 aliases involved. We also reserve the right to charge for providing DNS services

2. Subdomains. Most of the time when people refer to subdomains they want to have it resolve to different content than the "main" site. There are two ways of accomplishing this.
A. Create a separate site in IIS along with the corresponding separate A record in DNS. For this service Chinook Webs charges for a separate site.

B. Client requests an alias for the main site. Chinook Webs performs the alias as in paragraph 1. Client then creates a "subfolder" within the allotted space. Now here is one of the parts where windows hosting is different than Linux hosting. Client must now create a start page in the root of their site. This start page must read the server variable that includes the host header and then perform a redirect to the correct subfolder. I believe in php this can be accomplished with the $_server['http_host']. In classic ASP it can be done with request.ServerVariables("http_host"). In IIS there is no simple way for the web hosting company (none that we can find anyways) to redirect down to a subfolder. To summarize if the client requires us to create the redirect, we charge for a separate site since it is separately provisioned. If the client wishes to use aliases and programs (through code) their own redirect there usually is no charge (excessive use of aliases & dns hosting being the exception)

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28 Dec 2009 9:16 AM