Organizing Site Structure with Subdomains
Subdomains are additional domain names that enable you to:
- Organize logically the structure of your site
- Host additional Web sites or parts of your main Web site on the same server without the need to pay for registration of additional domain names.
An example of using subdomains:
You have a Web site your-product.com dedicated to promoting your software product. For publishing user's guides, tutorials and list of frequently asked questions, you can organize the subdomain 'userdocs' so that your users will be able to access online user documentation directly by visiting the domain name userdocs.your-product.com.
To set up a subdomain:
- On your Home page, click the domain name you need.
- Click the
Subdomains icon. - Click the
Add New Subdomain icon. - Type the subdomain name as desired. This can be, for example, a topic of your site, organization department, or any other combination of letters, numbers and hyphens (up to 63 characters in length).
The subdomain name must begin with an alphabet character. Subdomain names are case insensitive.
- If this subdomain will hold a part of your own Web site that you manage on your own, leave the Use the FTP user account of the parent domain option selected. If this subdomain will hold a separate web site that will belong to or will be managed by another person, select the Create a separate user account for this subdomain option, and specify the login name and password that will be used for accessing the web space through FTP and publishing web site content.
- If this subdomain will require secure transactions, select the SSL support checkbox. Then, the SSL certificate installed under the parent domain will be used for encrypting transactions.
By default, when you publish the site, you need to upload the web content that should be accessible via secure connections to the httpsdocs
directory, and the content that should be accessible via plain HTTP, to the httpdocs
directory. For your convenience, you can choose to publish all content through a single location – httpdocs
directory, to do this, select the option Use a single directory for housing SSL and non-SSL content.
- Specify the programming languages in which your web site is developed. Otherwise, your web site may not function properly.
For example, if your web site is written mainly in ASP and uses some applications written in PHP, such as those from the Application Vault (Home > domain name> Application Vault), select the ASP support and PHP support check boxes.
- If you wish to limit the amount of disk space that can be occupied by web content under this subdomain, type the desired value in megabytes into the Hard disk quota box.
When the specified limit is exceeded, you will not be able to add files to the web space, and editing existing files may corrupt them.
- To complete the setup, click OK. It may take up to 48 hours for the information on new subdomain to spread in the Domain Name System and become available to the Internet users.
To publish web content to the subdomain's web space, follow the instruction presented in the Publishing a Site section.
To preview the web content published under the subdomain, on your Home page, click the domain name you need, click the
Subdomains icon, and then click an icon
corresponding to the subdomain name.
To remove a subdomain with its web content:
- On your Home page, click the domain name you need.
- Click the
Subdomains icon. - Select a check box corresponding to the subdomain name that you wish to remove, and click
Remove Selected. - Confirm removal and click OK. The subdomain configuration and its web content will be removed from the server.