What is a subdomain?

[Kea777]

Can somone explain what is a subdomain?

Do I make them just by adding a slash....or do I buy them from domain sellers?

Do they stand alone on are they like html pages on my site?

Why use them?

[Ove]

Hi and welcom to WebmasterWorld

A subdomain is [subdomain.yourdomain.com...]

you just put an subdirectory and let your webhost know and they can arrange wildcard dns for you, but i dont know if you should use it subdirectory will do the same for you yourdomain.com/subdirectory.

Do a sitesearch for wildcard dns or subdomains and iam sure you will have a lot of reading in front of you.

/Ove

[Nermin]

geocities uses subdomains
like something.geocities.***

big internet providers will use them to give their clients a so called domain for free.

[choster]

Why use a subdomain? Several different reasons.

- Traditionally, subdomains represented different physical machines. Your mail servers were named mail1.widgets.com and mail2.widgets.com, and they sat on the floor across from gopher.widgets.com so you could use the extra outlet for your lava lamp. That's increasingly rare now, since proxies and routers are cheap and internal network arrangements are usually shielded from the Internet by firewalls.

- Large websites may become cumbersome to navigate from the top, so certain directories might get mapped to a subdomain-- instead of www.widgets.com/products-and-services/consumer/accessories/widgetfolders/holiday/red.html you could have widgetfolders.widgets.com/holiday/red.html . Yahoo is a good example. It's faster to type, uses less bandwidth, and easier to fit on print literature. It is like having your workgroup's folder on a corporate network mapped to a drive letter (instead of //share/marketing/offices/midwest/columbus/widgetcorpteam you could just go to e:\ ).

- Since subdomains are "inside" your domain name, you don't have to pay for extra registrations for them. Instead of having to pay the fes with different vendors for widgets.ca, widgets.dk, widgets.jp, and widgets.us you could simply have canada.widgets.com, denmark.widgets.com, japan.widgets.com, and us.widgets.com all through one domain bought from a single registrar.

For most people, I think it just comes down to personal preference for one url form over another.

[robert adams]

In my experience, when you set up the subdomain, what you have is a pointer to a sub directory. I have several subdomains on my server that I created from my contol panel. The control panel just creates a sub directory with that name and then creates a pointer to it.

poetry.cyberosis.net goes to cyberosis.net/poetry

robert

[robert adams]

also, some hosts do charge extra for sub domains. they shouldn't but they do.

robert

[anallawalla]

And some hosts let you create as many subdomains as you wish, because they are subdirectories from the root level. e.g.

html/index.html = www.mydomain.com
foo/html/index.html = foo.mydomain.com
bar/html/index.html = bar.mydomain.com

A subdomain is also likely to rank higher in the SERPs than a subdirectory, at least in my testing.

[sidyadav]

Subdomains are a very helpful bunch, they make you look more professional.

For example, if you own a big site, you can have many subdomains according to your content, like HowStuffWorks, Google , Yahoo and so many other sites :)

Sid