Multiple Website Hosting - Subdomains are the
Answer!
Many business owners find themselves in a quandary over the ways
to make the most of their company's web site. This is
especially true of those who have the need to maintain more than
one web site but do not wish to pay for multiple hosting
accounts. If this is you, a subdomain may be the answer.
Subdomains are sort of a site within a site. They are not,
however, simply additional pages of an existing web site. The
subdomain can have a web site all its own, completely separate
from the site located at the main domain name.
To understand the use and purpose of subdomains, it may be
necessary to first understand the concept of an internet domain
name. Every web site that is active on the internet (and there
are literally billions of them now - it was estimated as long
ago as 1996 that there were more web pages in existence than
there were people on Earth) has a unique domain name. There can
be only one Ebay dot com, for example, on the entire internet.
The domain name, however, is really just a way for humans to
relate to the site. Internet servers see web site names as
unique I.P. addresses. It is the domain name server that
translates those numbers into names and back again.
A subdomain is simply an offshoot of your web site's domain. In
terms of the way it appears on the server, the subdomain is
simply a folder or a sub directory located within your domain's
root directory. Any sub directory can serve as a sub domain.
For example, if your web site is "www.mycompany.com" and you
store the images for your site in a directory called "images,"
then you could, if you wished, create a subdomain at "images.
mycompany.com". As long as you put an "index.html" page in the
folder you should be able to pull it up in a web browser that
way. In most cases you will create a new sub directory to be
associated with a subdomain and some web hosts do not support
subdomains on their servers or put a limit on the number of
subdomains you may associate with your site.
The benefits of using subdomains as opposed to opening multiple
hosting accounts are twofold. First, you get the obvious
benefit of only having to pay for one hosting account. You also
benefit from being able to have a completely separate web site,
but one that your customers will easily recognize as being
associated in some way with your business. Some companies will
set up subdomains for various divisions (xyz.com may also have
sales.xyz.com or support.xyz.com) and some will use subdomains
for various businesses that are all offshoots of the same parent
company.
That association could be a downside to using subdomains as well.
If you want to keep the relationship between your companies
under wraps (like Disney tried so hard to do with Touchstone
Pictures so many years ago), you may want to use multiple
accounts rather than subdomains. The web address
clandestineproducts.megamall.com would clearly betray that there
was some connection between Clandestine Products and Megamall,
whether you wanted that information to be known or not.
John Michaels is a freelance author for
http://www.webhostpacks .
com/ where he regularly publishes internet related articles
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