Hello
Does hostmysite.com offer sub domains, like forums@mydomain.com?

You mean something like this:

http://forums.hostmysite.com

right?

We can create subdomains for your accounts, however we cannot repoint them to a subfolder of your website for you. The reason for this is that our policy permits only a single unique website per account, and a unique website is defined by it's homepage (more or less). However, if you'd like to redirect your subdomains yourself, you can do so either using Cold Fusion or ASP. If you're not familiar with those techniques let me know and I can drum up some sample code for you.

Are you leaning toward creating subdomain access in the future? I do use the domain alias feature to point to different folders, however I have about 5 or 6 clients who have mentioned that they would very much like to use subdomains with their members: members.domain.xyz

I would like to provide them the access, since many hosts offer this for free. Is this something that is being considered?

As Jamie mentioned, we can create subdomains for your accounts, as in forums.mydomain.com within our DNS for you to point to your root address. Beyond that you would need to redirect the subdomains yourself as our terms of service does not currently permit us to support/code this for you. So all the capabilities are there, you would just have to submit a request for us to add the information to our DNS and run with it from there.

The main problem here lies in the configuration issues that arise when you use subdomains. The hosts that are granting free subdomains most likely add them to the server's IIS configuration as a separate website - which quickly leads to overcrowding of servers since you no longer have an accurate estimate of the true number of websites on a server. We prefer to ONLY create a new site in IIS for unique sites, which lets us gauge how 'full' a server is before we retire it. In turn, this aids us by keeping both hardware and support costs at a minimum.

While we are one the topic.. I was wondering.. how do domains like this work?

http://kbase.info.apple.com

--Bob

That's actually a fairly involved question. A domain name such as

hostmysite.com

takes it's properties from something called the Domain Name Zone Record. The Zone Record is stored on the Authorativie Nameservers for the domain; that is, the nameservers that are listed on the Domain Name's WhoIs Record. You can get a domain's WhoIs Record by performing a WhoIs Lookup at a website such as

www.betterwhois.com

If you look at the bottom of the record after looking up a domain, you'll notice something like this:

Name Server:NS2.LNHI.NET
Name Server:NS1.LNHI.NET
Name Server:NS3.LNHI.NET

These 'name servers' are what a web browser looks up when you type the domain name into it's URL/Address field. The nameservers, in turn, have a record of what IP address the domain name should ultimately resolve to. There are several ways to do this, but the end result is the same - the domain name points to an IP. Subdomains, such as 'foo.hostmysite.com', are also determined by the Zone file found in the nameservers. Each subdomain can be directed to a different IP address. In addition, sub-subdomains can also be created - i.e. 'woo.foo.hostmysite.com'. In theory there is no limit to the number of levels that you can go, however I've never seen anything progress past this example.

That's actually a pretty simplified version of how that works - if you need specifics let me know.

Yea, if I'm correct, I think that is how the domains from new.net work. You purchase something like smith.family from them, but the actual address is smith.family.new.net.

Do you do stats for subdomains which include error logs,as i find many hosting firms don't.

These stats would be rolled into the 'normal' stats for your domain since a subdomain uses the same site in IIS.

Thank's Jamie
I will look into and compare services being offered and get back to you.

c'mon Jamie, in todays web world, this is a pretty lame excuse IMHO. Time to adjust the policy.

For example, I have several different webapps that I use all the time.

blog
wiki
forums
etc...

and I would love to be able to set up subdomains for blog.mydomain.com, wiki.mydomain.com, forums.mydomain.com instead of having to write a redirect script or type in www.mydomain.com/wiki or www.mydomain.com/blog all the time. IIS supports this and I'd love to take advantage of this feature.

I was going to install flexwiki on my davisplanet.com domain here today and requested to have a subdomain pointed to my /flexwiki directory - when I got the support ticket response email telling me they could set up the subdomain, but couldn't point it to a sub directory, I just jumped over to my JodoHost webspace and set it up myself in 5 minutes in Hsphere, albeit under one of my other domain names.

IIS will allow subdomains, but it increases the number of sites on the server as well, giving an inaccurate number of sites on the server.

one work around to this would be to get a VPS account. You can then manage the sub domains as you prefer and setup apache virtual containers for each one. When we roll out Windows VPS you could use IIS to setup an IIS entry for each sub domain you wanted.

I have a need for a subdomain, strictly for testing purposes. I set up the domain: testing.domainname.com, but I was told that I need to provide a re-direct script. Can you post a sample so I can get an idea? Thanks,

Dan