What are subdomains?

Subdomains are the third level domains that are used to organise your web site content.

They are just like folders under your root directory. But they will have a special URL to access.

http://www.yoursite.com

is a regular URL with out a subdomain.

http://products.yoursite.com

is an URL with subdomain "products".Here the:

• .com is the first level domain
• yoursite is the second level domain
• products is the third level domain

What is the purpose of subdomains?

1.You can organise your web site.Like support,help and FAQ at 'http://support.yoursite.com'.And your products and order links under 'http://store.yoursite.com' etc.

2.If you have members or you want to share your disk space with your friends, you can create a subdomain for each of them and give access with their own user name and password.

3.You can also organise the email addresses that comes to seperate departments on your web site.Like support@support.yoursite.com orders@store.yoursite.com etc.

4.Long URLs are cut short to a subdomain, so it is easy to remember the short URL instead of long URLs. Especially this is true with your affiliate links which are long and with many special characters like '?','&' etc.This is difficult to remember.So in these cases creating a subdomain for that long URL helps to remember it well.

Where to get subdomains?

Your host could provide subdomains for you.Number of subdomains that are alloted for you depends on the type of hosting plan you are using.

You can use 'subdomains' icon or text link in your control panel to create,delete and edit your subdomains.

If your host doesn't offer subdomains then you can get them free with free domain offering services.They will give you free subdomains which redirect the visitors to your particular URL.But they will keep an advertisement on your subdomain URL.

Search for 'free subdomains' in your favorite search engine.You will get a list of web sites that offer sub domains to people.You can choose the one you want.

Caution:

If you offer subdomains to your members or friends means you are responsible for the band width and disk space usage.

Think twice before giving access to your cgi-bin because your subdomains have seperate cgi-bins.

What will be the paths to files and cgi script?

If you have an image 'logo.gif' under 'support' subdomain then you can keep your image file path as:

'http://support.yoursite.com/logo.gif'

'http://yoursite.com/support/logo.gif'

'/logo.gif'

But NOT like this:

'/support/logo.gif'

Same with the cgi-bin too.

The path to cgi files should be:

'/public_html/support/cgi-bin/scriptname.cgi'
(this first path varies on different servers.On some it is 'public_html' and some '/home/username-www/')

The URL for cgi files will be:

'http://support.yoursite.com/cgi-bin/scriptname.cgi'

'http://yoursite.com/support/cgi-bin/scriptname.cgi'