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How do I create subdomains?

Everyone has a "www" subdomain (In "www.yourdomain.com", the "www" part is the subdomain). The www subdomain is created by, and serves files from, your /htdocs/www directory on the filesystem.

To add more subdomains, just create new subdirectories in the /htdocs directory.

For instance, if you had the domain name mychevycars.com and wanted a subdomain for Corvettes, then you would just create the directory /htdocs/corvettes and upload the files in there that you wanted to see at http://corvettes.mychevycars.com

Second Level Subdomains
To create second level subdomains like www.corvettes.mychevycars.com ("www" is the second level subdomain and "corvettes" is the first level subdomain in this example) then you would do one of the following:

1. If you have made an /htdocs/corvettes directory so that you have http://corvettes.mychevycars.com then you can make http://www.corvettes.mychevycars.com by getting a shell prompt and creating a symlink like so:

cd /htdocs
ln -s corvettes www.corvettes

Now http://www.corvettes.mychevycars.com will lead to the same place as http://corvettes.mychevycars.com and all the files for both of these URLs are uploaded in the /htdocs/corvettes directory.

2. Alternatively, you may want your second level subdomain to lead to a separate area of your website instead of being symlinked together with the first level subdomain. For example you may want http://splitbumper.corvettes.mychevycars.com (where "splitbumper" is the second level subdomain) to lead to a section of your website dedicated to 1963-1965 Corvettes with split bumpers, and have http://corvettes.mychevycars.com just lead to a different section of your site about Corvettes in general. To setup the second level subdomain this way, you would make a separate directory altogether for it, like this:

cd /htdocs
mkdir splitbumper.corvettes

The "splitbumper.corvettes" subdirectory is created right alongside all the other subdomain subdirectories, including the "corvettes" subdirectory, if you made one. Then you upload files related to splitbumpers into the /htdocs/splitbumper.corvettes subdirectory, and view them in a browser at http://splitbumper.corvettes.mychevycars.com

User-Contributed Notes

06-Mar-2003 12:27

If you need to delete a subdomain symlink made with the "ln -s ..."
  
     rm -f /htdocs/www.corvettes

08-Oct-2003 09:30

Make sure the directory name you create is all lower-case, with no
spaces. CAPS or Mixed-Case will not work.

tru -at- ascribedata.com
07-Nov-2003 21:09

Careful that you only use letters, numbers and (I think) hyphens in your
sub-domains. I spent a whole day debugging and wondering why PHP
sessions weren't carrying through page to page. It was because I had an
underscore in the subdomain. As soon as I changed the subdomain name not
to have an underscore, then PHP sessions worked again and I could login
to my application.

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