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Are Subdomains Limited To One Level?


Wilexa

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Someone gave me a call when she couldn't reach a subdomain of mine (i.e. subdomain.****). She had mistakenly managed to get "www.subdomain.domain.com" into her browser address bar.

 

Can we set up a "www" folder in a subdomain and then make it a "second level" subdomain?

 

Just curious.

 

...Dave

 

Rock Sign

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Those are actually forth level domains and NO, that's not possible here (as in its.my.domain.com is not possible.

 

Third level domains are subdomains as we all know and love them (my.domain.com, yay.tchrocks.com, etc.)

 

Second level domains are our domain names as we refer to them (domain.com and tchrocks.com, etc).

 

Top Level Domains or TLD's are the .com, .org, etc.

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Maybe this is the answer you do want to hear.

 

There has been a change recently in the way CPanel sets up subdomains. It now adds two entries to the DNS Zone and httpd.conf files so that either subdomain.domain.com or www.subdomain.domain.com works.

 

That means that if you have a subdomain that has been set up for a while it is likely just set up to use subdomain.domain.com as a url. If you delete the subdomain and recreate it, it should set up both with and without the www as options.

 

Once warning, though, I have seen some cases where only the www.subdomain.domain.com url works. It's not hard to fix but it could mean a trip to the Help Desk.

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Rick, I know of and have seen sites that have more than 2 periods in the url and my understanding is that the url is read from back to front and the first two periods found are treated as the separators for the TLD, domain, and subdomain. The next period found is now a "valid" character and treated as part of the subdomain name.

 

This would make the "www.subdomain" the full subdomain name. So I believe the full "www.subdomain.domain.com" will work if thats how you have it in cpanel.

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Sorry, I was wrong. Since there were two similar threads on this issue I decided to do a little research and looked up the RFC that would possibly help explain things. Well I ended up with a headache trying to understand what was said in the RFC :rolleyes:

 

Here it is for any of the brave souls reading.

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1034.html

 

The URL is read from left to right not right to left as I mentioned. The hiearchy of the tree structure is determined from right to left, highest to lowest. The period is not a character and will still act as a separator.

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