Creating Subdomains For Different Sites

In a domain of your own you can create a number of distinct different sites that are referenced by segment of your domain or a subdomain.

In the internet address, this can be anything added to the left side of your main domain prefaced by a “dot.” If we have a domain at StateU of gadgets.stateu.org we can create a different web site at something like a blog at thoughts.gadgets.stateu.org or a catalog of favorite videos at movies.gadgets.stateu.org.

Note that as a free trial service, StateU limits you to creating two subdomains; with a fully owned web hosting package, you typically can have an unlimited number of subdomains.

To create a subdomain, look for it’s icon in the Domains section:

In the form for Create a Subdomain, enter single word name (lowercase is best) for the subdomain, and click the Create button. For this example, we created a “thoughts” one for a blog and “movies” one for a separate site that will house a collection of gadget videos.

At this point we have not put anything there- a subdomain is merely a placeholder for where other content will live. The document root indicates the name of a subdirectory cpanel creates to hold this content. It’s worth knowing that each subdomain is merely another directory inside your domain, you can explore the structure in the cpanel File Manager.

If you completed the Adding a Self Contained Site With File Manager kit, you created a new site within a directory of another site. And we could have easily created these same sites as subdirectories of gadgets.stateu.org as folders- there is little difference between thoughts.gadgets.stateu.org and gadgets.stateu.org/thoughts.

For many, a subdomain makes it more clear that sites are different from each other whereas subdirectories might work better for different websites that are related. And you can also mix and match the approach. We might create a subdomain courses.stateu.org. for all the courses we teach but maybe we install different WordPress sites as subdirectories for different class sites, e.g. courses.stateu.org/intro-electronics and courses.stateu.org/microcode-systems for another.

When you have a full domain, it’s usually better to add new sites as subdomains if they are ones that used databases (e.g. moodle, WordPress, Omeka) as sometimes directories have special meanings to these platforms.

Example for "Creating Subdomains For Different Sites":
http://domains.eduhack.eu/wp-content/uploads/sites/58/2020/07/subdomains.jpg