How to configure subdomain hosting without domain hosting?

[Robert Williams]

Wilhelmina:

First, your university's authoritive domain information lives at either GoDaddy (if all the DNS records are maintained in GoDaddy's DNS system) or your university's servers (if the domain account at GoDaddy points all DNS queries to the university's DNS servers). Typically, an 'A' record is created on the primary DNS server to "point" a sub-domain at a specific server by IP address. Unfortunately, you're probably stuck with the campus IT staff having to do that 'A' record setup/edit for you if you want to use the university's main domain name.

However, the cheapie hosting provider should be able to provide a static IP address for your hosting account, albeit at an additional cost over your normal monthly/annual hosting costs. The rate for a dedicated IP address varies by hosting company, from $1 up to as much as $10 per month; I see that Dreamhost's cost is $3.95 per month. There are a number of reasons having a static IP assigned to your domain is a good idea (generally involving reverse DNS and spam block lists). This would solve the problem of needing IT to perform periodic updates of the IP address in the university's DNS records.

I'm not familiar with a really good way to assign the sub-domain without a static IP address (others may be). I've always run into trade-offs like you mentioned.

Hope that helps a bit.

--Robert

*********************************************
Robert L. Williams
Manager, Open Source ILS Services
Amigos Library Services, Inc.
14400 Midway Road
Dallas, TX 75244-3509
800-843-8482, x2870
972-340-2870 (direct)
972-991-6061 (fax)

From: Web technologies in libraries [mailto:WEB4LIB at LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Wilhelmina Randtke
Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2012 10:15 AM
To: WEB4LIB at LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: [WEB4LIB] How to configure subdomain hosting without domain hosting?

I'm trying to get a subdomain of my university's domain pointed at content on a cheapie hosting account.  To do this, I can get main campus to put in a CNAME record with the IP address matching where the DNS for my cheapie hosting account is currently located in the cheapie hosting company's system.  The problem is, this IP will periodically change, meaning main campus IT will have to be involved periodically down the line in order to cut and paste the new IP into their system, and meaning that the hosted services could go unavailable for a few days when this happens.

The main campus uses GoDaddy's DNS which is set in stone, and the cheapie hosting in question is Dreamhost but any other cheapie service would do.

Am I doing this the hard way?  How would you go about getting a subdomain of your university's URL to point at your cheapie webhosting account?

Subdomain forwarding with masking then storing content at a random URL but having it appear to be on the university's subdomain does not work, because this causes problems responding to XML queries.
I am able to run a server in my office or the building with a static IP, but I don't want content to live on an in-house server.  Could I use this to catch things coming to the IP, then redirect to the cheapie hosting account?
Is there a way to go from GoDaddy's DNS management system to point at the nameservers for the cheapie hosting company, the same way you would do to host a domain?

-Wilhelmina Randtke
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2012-11-27

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2012-11-28
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