How do you create a www.WHATEVER.mysite.com?

[Duke Will]

Like a subdirectory in the site but it's located by a string within the URL.

www.REP.mysite.com, and REP is what would change.

What I want to do: I have created a 3-page site. The last page is a 'Contact' page. I want reps in my company to have their own site. The only thing that would change would be the last page, the Contact page. It would pull up THEIR info, not mine. And the URL they give out would be something like www.REP.mysite.com.

How can I do this? Please be as specific as possible, as I am no expert. We have our own server, leased from Rackspace.

[TiGGi]

You need to create sub domain where ever is your domain registered. If you have access to your zone files then you can do it yourself if not then contact your registrar and have them do it.

[Duke Will]

Rats, I'll bet that will be problematic, since I used an el cheapo registrar.

I would think though, that www.rep.mysite.com would be better than www.mysite.com/rep.

[Stephen Philbin]

If you want all those subdomains linked in some way though, you're also going to need someone that knows their way around a UNIX filesystem and can configure Apache accordingly. Well... that's assuming you're on a UNIX/Linux box with Apache installed of course. Dunno what the hell you'd have to do if you were on a Windows box.

[Duke Will]

If you want all those subdomains linked in some way though, you're also going to need someone that knows their way around a UNIX filesystem and can configure Apache accordingly. Well... that's assuming you're on a UNIX/Linux box with Apache installed of course. Dunno what the hell you'd have to do if you were on a Windows box.

That person is my brother. He's not available or I'd ask him. ;)

Yes, it's Apache UNIX/Linux.

I was wondering what is involved because I would need to pay him to do this for each person. Or if once it's set up, he can teach me, I could do it. Or maybe he sets it up with some sort of database interface just plugs in the right info?

As for www.mysite.com/rep, even I could do that, haha. Actually, I could manually copy and paste and do it, but, ideally, since this could turn into dozens of reps, the website would need to pull the info for each rep from a database or something. So I wouldn't have to mess with the Contact Page (for each rep) by hand each time.

[TiGGi]

Verio is pretty good registrar and not expensive and they let you edit your own zone files. NetworkSolutions will do the same but they are more expensive. To transfer domain to Verio is about $10 which is small price to pay for a piece of mind and convinience!

[Duke Will]

Thanks for info. With a Registrar that gives you zone access, is this simple to create a subdomain? Is it done via a control panel? Once you do it, do you have to manually tweak things on your server?

[TiGGi]

YEs you have Cpanel with registrar where you have fields for your subdomain and IP address where it points and that's it. On ur web server all you have to do is create site or add subdomain to ur already existing site. There are no needs for tweaking whatsoever!

[Duke Will]

I visited the Verio.com site. We also use BulkRegister.com and they seem like a reliable Registrar, so, maybe i could use them. With Verio and BulkRegister, I see something called "CName" and it says something about subdomains. Is this what you are talking about for me to have a www.REP.mysite.com?

I would like to automate this as much as possible. I guess I have to manually create a directory under my main site for REP? Such as www.mysite.com/rep and with the CName feature, I would point www.REP.mysite.com to the subdirectory on my server, www.mysite.com/rep?

[Stephen Philbin]

I dunno how it is with other domain name providers, I've only ever used NetworkSolutions, but with my provider I can have pretty much anything.mydomainname.com point to me. So off the top of my head, I'd try to just point all subdomain requests to me, then use an Aliasmatch directive in Apache's httpd.conf to match any subdomain request to the relevant directory on the server and then just slap the same server side script in heach directory to make pretty much the same thing for each user, but slightly tailored to them. Unless you're already well familiar with configuring Apache, it'd probably take ages to explain. It'd probably take your brother about 5 minutes to do though.

[TiGGi]

- A CNAME record maps an alias or nickname to the real or Canonical name which may lie outside the current zone. Canonical means expected or real name. So answer to your question is Yes
- You can place your file whereever you want on your sever, www.mysite.com/rep would be just fine. All you need to do is point your subdomain to that directory using hostheaders or proxy, whatever you use~!