wildcard subdomains require dedicated servers?

:)

[kidmercury]

hello,

not 100% sure if this is the right area for this question, so i apologize if it is not.

i asked my hosting provider to enable wildcard subdomains on my site, and he said i would need a dedicated server for that. is this true? also, are there any risks associated with enabling wildcard subdomains?

thanks in advance for any help :)

[Frequent]

Depending on the setup you may need a dedicated IP but not a dedicated server. You may want to check out some other hosts.

I have a few shared hosting accounts that have wildcard set up by default. I can guarantee the accounts are not on a dedicated server and in fact they are not on dedicated IPs either.

Freq---

[jdMorgan]

That is a policy of your hosting company, not a technical requirement. If this is a "cheap host," then their response is to be expected. Better, slightly-more-costly hosting services often enable wild-card DNS by default on even shared virtual hosting.

The extremely-difficult and challenging 'technical' change is from:

ServerName example.com
ServerAlias www.example.com

to

ServerName example.com
ServerAlias *.example.com

As you can see, this is very difficult techno-stuff, and would require our highly-trained and highly-paid staff to spend hours making the change... ;)

To be fair, they're trying to avoid the situation where "one site" becomes hundreds of different sites, all hosted under one master domain. For example, you could set up el-cheapo-websites.com, and then re-sell web hosting at <your_name_goes_here>.el-cheapo-websites.com, with each subdomain/username mapped to a subdirectory under el-cheapo-websites.com. For small personal Web sites with few pages, that would be OK with a limited number of users, but could get out of hand with dozens or hundreds of users, all publishing larger sites.

The best way to address this is a clear policy to prohibit re-selling of their hosting services or offering free hosting to others under your account, plus enforceable limits on CPU, disk, and traffic. But just saying it "requires" a dedicated server is misleading.

Probable translation: "We want more $$$."

If all you want to do is to set up a few subdomains for testing or for 'branding' sections of your existing site, then tell them so, and ask that they reconsider, so that you don't have to spend six hours moving your site to another hosting company that wants your business... :)

However, if you do want to re-sell space, or offer free space in return for some promotional advantage, then consider upgrading your account (at your current host or elsewhere) to support this activity as a "cost of doing business."

Jim