I wonder what you want to accomplish with an off-site housed subdomain. Are
you not allowed to establish this within your university's own system? I
operate a server that is apart from my university's system because there
were objections concerning the extra load on the university server system.
I was also concerned because the university system slows down or goes down
completely. I also wanted better control of the server than I could have
with a university-maintained server.

If you select a "cheapie" service your website will inherit all of the
potential problems with your university's system on top of the problems
with a cheapie server.

Have you considered having your own domain name? I'm not convinced that
using a university subdomain will increase your credibility over your own
dot org domain name. Although I'm not certain, I suspect that you will have
better information about site traffic with your own domain.

Please tell us why you want a sub-domain of your university domain and a
little more about the kind of site you have planned. What traffic load do
you anticipate?

If you elect to have your own domain name, be sure that you buy the domain
name from a company that actually sells you the domain name and _not_ a
hosting company that gives you a package whereby the host owns your domain
name and leases it to you along with your hosting plan. That could make it
impossible for you to move to another company. Be careful. I started out
making many mistakes. It wasn't so important when my site received a few
hundred visitors a day. Having a portable domain name and the right hosting
company became essential when we started receiving several hundred thousand
visits a day. My site is a bibliographic database.

David

David W. Lawrence, PhD, MPH, Director
Center for Injury Prevention Policy and Practice
San Diego State University, School of Public Health
6475 Alvarado Road, Suite 105
San Diego, CA  92120  [log in to unmask]
V 619 594 1994   F 619 594 1995  Skype: DWL-SDCAwww.CIPPP.org  --
www.SafetyLit.org




On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 10:16 AM, Thomas Krichel <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

>   Wilhelmina Randtke writes
>
> > 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.
>
>   I am probably something missing here, as my experience is with root
>   servers rather than web hosting. But I do know a bit about DNS. My
>   expernienc suggests that once you have a CNAME, in BIND notation
>
> foo IN CNAME bar
>
>   the name foo is replaced by name bar. There is no IP address involved.
>   If bar changes changes IP address, the IP address of foo also changes.
>   In fact, all record types attached to bar carry over to foo. So you
>   can't say
>
> foo IN CNAME bar
> foo IN NS widget
>
>   as the NS (nameserver) for foo is the same as the NS for bar, not
>   widget.
>
> > Am I doing this the hard way?
>
>   You have not told us what you do.
>
> >  *How would you go about getting a subdomain
> > of your university's URL to point at your cheapie webhosting account?  *
>
>   If your webhoster gives you a URL at
>
> http://randtke.webhoster.com
>
>   your uni DNS can just say
>
> randtke IN CNAME randtke.webhoster.com.
>
> >  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 don't understand that approach, so I suspect my answer is off
>   the mark but it may still be helpful.
>
>
>   Cheers,
>
>   Thomas Krichel                    http://openlib.org/home/krichel
>                                       http://authorprofile.org/pkr1
>                                                skype: thomaskrichel
>