Xupeng's blog

Jan 27, 2008 - 2 minute read - Comments

Tricks to use sub-domain name at hostmonster.com

I have a domain name(thinkingtracker.com) which is registered at godaddy.com, I think godaddy is one of the best domain name providers, because it’s price is relatively lower, and most important thing is that godaddy allow you to control your domain name in very detail mode, such as you can set your mx records, add/delete cname, add/delete a record, it’s very convince if you need flexibility as I need. My requirement:
  1. use my domain name(thinkingtracker.com) to setup google apps service.
  2. point one of my sub-domain to my company’s server, to serve my django powered blog.
  3. point one of my sub-domain to hostmonster.com, to test hostmonster’s service, then determine if I use it as my next virtual hosting provider.
My requirement is very simple, right? but unfortunately it is not that easy as I think at first. I first setup my google apps service, and then point one of my sub-domain name to our companny, these two steps work perfectly. but the last one make me very disappointed, there is no way to just point one sub-domain to hostmonster, the only way to use a new domain name is to add my domain name as an add-on domain name, which means that I should use hostmonster’s DNS server as my domain’s default DNS server, in that way, I cannot point any of my sub-domain to my company’s server. But I find there are tricks to satisfy my requirement:
  1. change my default DNS server to hostmonster.com’s ones, then add my domain name as an add-on domain name at hostmonster.com, now I can add as much sub-domain names as I want, but this sub-domain names can only be used at hostmonster.for example: I add cake.thinkingtracker.com and django.thinkingtracker.com
  2. change the default DNS server to godaddy’s ones, and add A records which point to hostmonster’s IP, for example: I add two A records:
    cake -> 1.1.1.1(hostmonster IP)
    django -> 1.1.1.1(hostmonster IP)
  3. add A records point to my company’s server.
ah, all works perfectly now, tastes great!