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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.
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