Creating Subdomains

Author: David Boutcher (http://www.badbison.com/)

The first thing you need to understand when creating subdomains is what you are trying to achieve and what each of the different option ISPConfig 3 will give you. There are two ways to create subdomains and both behave very differently but can easily be confused.

Method 1

The first is from the ‘Sites’ menu tab select  ‘Subdomain for website’ and the click ‘Add new subdomain’. This method will create a subdomain for the parent wesbite but redirecting you to a different URL.

billing.mydomain.com    >   abillingsite.com

Method 2

The second method is from ‘Sites’ menu select ‘Add new website’.  In the domain field you can enter the site name, including the subdomain. For example, billing.mydomain.com. In this method ISPConfig 3 will create a subdomain with it’s own unique webspace. This could be really useful for an ISP to provide one short domain name and give subdomains to customer at absolutely no cost as each of the subdomains do not need to be registered with a registrar.

ISP registers supersites.com

Customers get given:

• abc.supersites.com
• mysite.supersites.com
• jahoo.supersites.com

The difference is clear, creating a new subdomain adds to the parent domain and can redirect and method 2 creates a subdomain with it’s very own website.

Don’t forget to make CNAME DNS entries for the subdomains. You can find a tutorial for CNAMES here.