Muliple Subdomain and WebApplication/WebSites Madness

Hello fellow DASP users and staff:

My domain was registered with namecheap: let's call it mydomain.com. I have already updated the DNS entries to point to the discountasp DNS servers.

Now, this is my goal, I want my domain split into subdomains as follows:

• www.mydomain.com
  • Pointing to a simple website for the front of my organization, mostly only with info and links to the sections below.
• apps.mydomain.com
  • Under this sub-domain I intend to give access to the main products and services I offer, for example:
    • http://apps.mydomain.com/app1/ — some Web Application (in ASP.NET/MVC/WebAPI)
    • http://apps.mydomain.com/app2/ — some Web Application (in ASP.NET/MVC/WebAPI)
    • http://apps.mydomain.com/website1/ — some Web Site (in WebMatrix or something else)
    • ... and so on
• labs.mydomain.com
  • This sub-domain is similar to the above, but it will contain applications and websites that are not considered (mostly demos, projects in beta stage, future projects, etc...)
    • http://labs.mydomain.com/the-next-big-app1/
    • http://labs.mydomain.com/dev-app2/
    • http://labs.mydomain.com/rant-website1/
    • ... and so on
• blog.mydomain.com
  • Pointing to a single website based on Blogger or Wordpress.
• forum.mydomain.com
  • Pointing to a single website running some PHP forum.
• ... and so on

I want to host all the websites and applications as described above under one single account in DASP (for now, since I agree that once I'm ready to scale out the wiser thing would be to have more than one IP).

I would like to know which are by best options to accomplish this setup. I'm aware of the the Domain Pointers and the Unlimited Subdomain add-ons, but I'm not sure I understand completely what's the reason to use either. Is this something I can do on the DNS Manager on my.discountasp.net?

Also, does Domain Pointer option mean that I have to purchase one for each subdomain of mydomain.com.

Does that also mean that, since any the pointers are going to be pointing to the single root of my primary domain, mydomain.com, something like

http://labs.mydomain.com/some-app/​

would resolve to the same thing as would

http://apps.mydomain.com/some-app/​

That kinda completely defeats the purpose of having those subdomains to begin with.

I appreciate your patience for having read this question and I'd much continue appreciating if you provide some insight to this conundrum...

 

You can order subdmains as Domain Pointers using your Control Panel, but I think a more efficient way to go about this would be to purchase the Unlimited Subdomain/Unique IP add-on for your account, this will give you a unique IP address that you can use to point any additional domain names that you want to your hosting space and well as create a wildcard subdomain mapping that will forward all subdomain traffic to the root of your hosting space.

You can also edit this wildcard mapping in your Control Panel's DNS Manager if you needed a certain subdomain (like "blog") to resolve to somewhere else (like WordPress.com or where-ever your blog is hosted).

In our environment Domain Pointers and subdomains do resolve to the root of your hosting space, so initially you will need to implement redirection to further guide traffic to it's destination subdirectory.

So:

http://labs.mydomain.com/

would have to be redirected to:

http://mydomain.com/some-app/

HOWEVER you can utilize the URL Rewrite Module available in IIS Manager on our IIS 7 and IIS 8 accounts to rewrite the URL in a client's browser so that while they are really browsing content at:

http://mydomain.com/some-app/

in their browser bar it looks like:

http://labs.mydomain.com/

I suggest that you give this Knowledge Base article a look through, it covers a lot of topics on hosting multiple site's, and applications in a single hosting account with us.

http://support.discountasp.net/KB/a1131/how-to-host-multiple-domains-under-one-account.aspx

This article uses Domain Pointers so that different domains resolve to the root of your hosting space, but since you want your new applications and sites called on by subdomain, the subdomain add-on can be used instead.

 

Helpful stuff. Along the same lines, I'm thinking about migrating our Wordpress blog from an off-site location to a sub-domain of our dasp domain (.asp store) & server, adding a MySQL database for the Wordpress application. The primary reason to migrate is to increase the SEO rating of our store by introducing new content regularly on the blog, under the same domain as the store. Which of methods would best accomplish that?