HOWTO: Pointing Sub-domain to webpage on Azure Platform?

[Xleeque]

Hi team,

I am a little confused by "sub-domain add-on" and "CNAME Record". I need to pay 5 dollars a month to get a sub-domain from DiscountASP.Net, but at the same time I can add a "CNAME Record" through "DNS Manager" under "Control Panel" for free.

This is what I am trying to achieve: I have a webpage hosted on Microsoft Windows Azure platform, it has a unique URL such as "mycoolstuff.cloudapp.net". Now I need to map "mycoolstuff.xleeque.com" to "mycoolstuff.cloudapp.net", how can I do that? (Webpage "mycoolstuff.cloudapp.net" accesses SQL Azure database intensively so it needs to be hosted on Azure platform, while my other pages still remain largely hosted on DiscountASP.Net).

Here is how I would achieve it (based on an idea from this link (http://blog.smarx.com/posts/custom-domain-names-in-windows-azure)), add a "CNAME Record" entry like this:

Domain Name: mycoolstuff.xleeque.com
Destination: mycoolstuff.cloudapp.net
TTL: 3600

Do I understand it correctly? What about 5-dollar per month for a sub-domain? What’s the difference?

Thanks a lot! :)


Regards,
Ben.

[jdcrutchley]

I'm sure someone official will correct me if I'm wrong, but...

I think the $5/month is for the unlimited subdomain options. That means no matter what someone types in their browser (www.yourdomain.com, comecoolsubdomain.yourdomain.com, boogers.yourdomain.com, whatever.yourdomain.com) the request will get to your stuff.

CNAME on the other hand just sets up a single subdomain, so if you were to only use CNAMEs you'd have to know each and every subdomain you want to use in advance, and if someone uses a subdomain that you haven't entered a CNAME for (like nothere.yourdomain.com) they'll just get a "domain not found" error.

[bruce]

Sub domain addon basically give your account an unique IP which you can point other sub domain to your site hosted with us.

Based on what you need, sounds like CName will do the trick.

[Xleeque]

Thanks a lot JD and Bruce for the answer, it definitely helped and I know exactly what I need to do now (just that "sub-domain add-on basically give my account a unique IP so I can point other sub-domain to my site hosted with DASP" did not quite make too much sense to me, but oh well, that's okay :)).

Thanks again,
Ben.