Overview
A subdomain is an extension of your primary domain or an addon domain that can serve as both an e-mail domain and website location.
Creating a subdomain
Configuration parameters
A subdomain may be added within the control panel under Web > Subdomains. A subdomain may exist in a few flavors and likewise function differently:
Subdomain
- create a new subdomain: basic subdomain name, e.g. “kb” -> kb.lithiumpanel.com
- create a subdomain fallthrough: a fallthrough will serve documents if and only if no other subdomain is matched. This is useful for WordPress multisite setups on a subdomain, e.g. sports.myblog.com, people.myblog.com, finance.myblog.com all served from 1 location. Any subdomain that exists, however, will serve content from that document root.
Subdomain affinity
- A subdomain affinity will create the subdomain on one or many domains. DNS will be automatically created for these domains so long as you use our nameservers.
Subdomain document root
- A document root is the location from which web site content is served. This may be shared by multiple subdomains by specifying the same location.
www exception
Any subdomain is valid, except a subdomain beginning with a “-” or “_” and www“, which is an alias to the domain from which the subdomain is created.
Placeholder file
Once a subdomain is created, a basic index.html placeholder is created in the directory to let you know everything is working. Remove or replace this file once confirmation is acknowledged. This is necessary to run Passenger-based applications or even PHP applications, like WordPress or Drupal.
Setting DNS if using third-party
In certain esoteric and baffling circumstances you may wish to use third-party nameservers apart from ours. If you use third-party nameservers, you are responsible for setting DNS for the subdomain. Submit the following DNS template to your third-party DNS provider:
<subdomain> IN A <IP address> www.<subdomain> IN A <IP address>