Is it possible / advisable to have a primary domain and an add-on domain point to different hosting? I don’t know all the particulars yet but am trying to anticipate a question.
Here’s my specific situation:
My wife volunteers with a non-profit that puts on a few fundraising events each year. The club is locally run and organized but falls under a international organization so their website is a templated spinoff of the international club’s setup (who manages the design and hosting).
So, they currently have a local domain registered (let’s call it localclub.com) that forwards to their site: internationalclub.com/localclub. My assumption (which hasn’t been confirmed) is that they only have their local domain registered, they dont have hosting attached.
What I’m wondering is, if I do this events site for them, the most sensible option to me would be to create an add-on domain (events.localclub.com) but I don’t know if it’s possible to have it setup where the add-on domain points to my hosting, but their top-level domain stays as it currently is (forwarding to the international site).
Edit: I should maybe tag the guru @barchard
In the example you are giving, it looks like you are talking in one spot about a subdomain events.localclub.com a domain localclub.com and a directory of a domain internationalclub.com/localclub.
So I guess my question would be does internationalclub.com/localclub just link to localclub.com?
Is there a localclub.com?
Is there a reason to have an events subdomain?
You should be able to point the DNS A record to whatever IP address you like. Now the question comes as if the second hosting company would be able to process and route that request.
Yeah, sorry I’m not being super clear. I don’t know why I’m being so cagey about it either.
So the club is a Rotary Club and their domain is airdrierotary.ca. That redirects to their website which is: https://portal.clubrunner.ca/939/ (this is a website/software setup that their International organization set up and the local chapters buy into then manage on their own, AFAIK).
So, their registered domain just functions as a pretty URL that they can use in marketing but just forwards/redirects to the clubrunner one. What I would be doing is creating a standalone site that allows them to promote their events and sell tickets online.
My thought was that I could create a sub-domain of events.airdrierotary.ca because they already own it, but I wasn’t sure of the logistics past that. Otherwise, I can just buy/register and entirely new domain.
So would you have access to the DNS records for airdrierotary.ca? If not there won’t be much you can do with subdomains. If you have access to the DNS setup (need access to the main domain) then you can set up an A record for the subdomain and point that to any IP address you want. Now that gets back to the original question, will the hosting company allow you to set up a subdomain(and process and route requests) for a domain they aren’t hosting?
I think it could be done technically, just don’t know if they would want to do it.
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We’ll see. I should have more details later in the week on where they’re registered and all that. I might just suggest a new domain anyway.
@jabostick
yes, you can do this. do you have control over the primary domain? You’d have to:
- Add the domain as an Add-on domain to every host you want to use
- Create the specific sub-domain (e.g.,
events.example.com) on the host you want to use
- Go to the primary host and add an
A record. The value of the A Record is the IP of the destination host you’d like to use.
Now, caveat here, you’re basically giving this other host some “seo” over your site/domain. If they hosted something bad, it could easily trickle back to the primary domain.
Hope that helps.
-Greg
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