“www” on subdomains

Many websites offer subdomains, but most of them fail when they are accessed with a “www”, such as www.subdomain.domain.com. The reality is that many users always write the three ‘w’s every time they write a web address. For this reason, I will explain how easy it is to configure your website to work with the “www” before a subdomain.

The trick is in the CNAME configuration. Just as you assigned a CNAME to your subdomain.domain.com, you now assign the “www.subdomain.domain.com” as a CNAME to “subdomain.domain.com”

An example entry of your Custom DNS Setting should look like this:

CNAME Record     subdomain                IN CNAME somesite.site.com

That will map your http://subdomain.domain.com to the site.com location. When users type in the “www” they will be sent to a “Page not Found” error page. To fix this, you add the other CNAME Record so that now it looks like this:

CNAME Record     subdomain                IN CNAME somesite.site.com

CNAME Record     www.subdomain      IN CNAME subdomain.domain.com

This last entry will fix your “www” problem for that subdomain.

~ by Rafael Sosa on May 2, 2007.

2 Responses to ““www” on subdomains”

  1. Will this work if you have mutiple subdomains?

    Thank you!

  2. Yes, this works for multiple subdomains. Just repeat these steps for all subdomains.

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