Domain Aliasing

2 different aff sites on one host account

[zmroberts]

Hey-

So I created my first aff site and I am planning on creating a second for a totally different product. I don't want to purchase another hosting plan, can I just buy another domain name and alias it to the web host that I have for my first plan? My hosting company offers aliasing/masking/forwarding and I thought aliasing made the most sense. Any info or opinions on this would be much appreciated.

Thanks

[Drastic]

Aliasing simply points a different domain to the same site, not a different one.

You need a hosting account that allows you to host more than one domain, and point the domain to their dns.

[zmroberts]

oh ok... so there is no way to alias or to mask a site to a different root directory for the same hosting plan? I guess I will call my host and find out what's the best/cheapest way to do this.

Thanks

[Drastic]

Yes, you can redirect a domain to a directory on your host. That will likely be a problem with SE indexing/spidering though.

[zmroberts]

spoke with my host... they suggested I "mask/forward" the new domain name to a specific page on the old web site. This page could serve as the home page for the new web site and I could go from there. It could even be in a different directory called "newwebsite" or something. Seems like if the domain is masked then any search engine would think it was basically on a completely seperate site and I shouldn't run into too many problems with SEO or spiders or anything. Any thoughts?

[zmroberts]

I need to revive this thread because I have done what I said I would do above. I have run into a problem.

I had one web site... say www.myfirstsite.com . I added a directory say... www.myfirstsite.com/secondsite/. I put all my second site content in that folder. I masked aliased domain name www.mysecondsite.com to that folder. It works great but the problem is that every page under that folder no matter what the url is, it is showing up as www.mysecondsite.com and thats it. I thought it would show up as www.mysecondsite.com/mypage.htm or something. Do I just have to go spend another $40 for a second hosting plan to run my second site? thanks

[ergophobe]

Honestly, this isn't really a domain issue, this is a server issue. If your host can't get this working for you, they are incompetent. There are basically four components to the way virtual hosting works (which is what allows shared hosting).

IP - this is like your phone number
domain name - this is like your name
DNS - this is like the phone book - look up the domain, get the IP
httpd.conf - this is like your local switchboard in your front office (assuming Apache here; I don't know IIS at all).

The hosting company doesn't really control the first three except insofar as they purchase some IP blocks. They only take care of what happens when, after a successful DNS lookup, traffic gets routed to their server by IP.

So you can go one of two ways

- shared IP
- separate IP for each account. In this case the httpd.conf is going to look like this

NameVirtualHost *

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.2>
ServerAdmin [e-mail]
DocumentRoot /home/htdocs/site1
ServerName site1.com
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.3>
ServerAdmin [e-mail]
DocumentRoot /home/htdocs/site2
ServerName site2.com
</VirtualHost>

From the perspective of the visitor (including SEs) there should be no difference between this and two acounts on two different hosting companies, except it will be apparent that the IPs are from the same IP block which, if you are doing really bad stuff and get banned, it *might* be possible to reconstruct your network easier.

If you are sharing an IP, it will be similar, but it will achieve the separation by doing redirects or rewrites based on domain name and shunt the requests to a subdir. From the perpective of the visitor it should be the same unless they are savvy and go looking up your IP. For SEs, if they decide to ban you as a spammer/black hat SEO, all they need to do is a reverse DNS and ban everything mapped to that IP.

Realistically, most people with genuine sites don't need to worry about that, but at the same time most hosts will offer you an IP for about $1/month so if you're worried about sharing an IP, that's a cheap way to go.

[ergophobe]

PS your problem is because they screwed up the redirect as they forgot to append the incoming URL after the domain to the rewritten URL.