New website on old hosting

April 20, 2008 3:41 PM

I have some hosting. I use oldtld.com currently as a TLD, to point people at it. On oldtld.com, there are several subdirectories, which I'll call /olddir1, /olddir2, etc. What I want is to be able to buy a new TLD - newtld.com - and point it at the same hosting, yet keep the two separate.

I want to be able to keep directory structures like oldtld.com/olddir1, AND be able to have a new directory structure, like newtld.com/newdir1. I'd to have the hosting set up so that each TLD has it's own directories, but without someone being able to come along and type in oldtld.com/newdir1 and have the directory appear. I want to keep all the "old" and "new" sections separate, on the same hosting.

Confused yet? :D

Is this possible, and if so, what do I need to do/say to my hosting provider to make it happen?

posted by Rabulah to computers & internet (8 comments total)

I'm not sure if I completely understand, but it sounds as if you want Virtual Hosting.
posted by eclectist at 3:47 PM on April 20

Most web hosts allow you to run multiple domains off your account, each with its own independent directory structure. If yours does not, it's perversely old-fashioned. Assuming it's not, your host should have some docs explaining how to do this.
posted by adamrice at 3:50 PM on April 20

If you mean you're looking for olddomain.com/dir1 and newdomain.com/dir1 to go to different places, but using the same hosting account, then, as mentioned above, you want to figure out how to host two domains on one account.

My webhost calls this an "add-on" domain, somewhat different from a "parked" domain.

Also, FYI, the top-level domain is the last bit. ".com" or ".net" the part before the TLD is actually called the "second-level domain".
posted by toomuchpete at 4:33 PM on April 20

This is something the web host will have to set up for you. (The good news is that you shouldn't have to do much yourself)
posted by winston at 4:35 PM on April 20

This is something which can be easily accomplished with mod_vhost, assuming Apache. It's also, as mentioned above, part of most hosting packages, and in many cases can be enabled with the web admin control panel. Your hosting company support folks should be able to decipher what you asked, if you ask he same way.
posted by tomierna at 4:46 PM on April 20

FYI, the TLD (top level domain) in your example is ".com" instead of "olddomain".

You're concerned with a 2LD or SLD (second level domain).
posted by Leon-arto at 5:00 PM on April 20

It'd be good for you to learn a little DNS. It was great to be able to monitor how DNS changes were made and how some local changes propagated the internet in order to learn about it for me. Also to know when I needed to contact the networking department when it was necessary to poke holes in the firewall/PIX to allow a new IP into a box. In Unix w/a Netscape/iPlanet/Sun ONE webserver, we'd have to create a new virtual server, add zones to our gateway box and 'HUP' (restart) the inetd process, inform networking of the new ip and port(s) 80/443 et al, and maybe our ISP, too. We might also have to let the Windows dept. know in case they were responsible for anything.

Sites that helped w/the DNS propagation were dnsstuff.com and samspade.org. Here, too. There are many others, of course. Good luck.
posted by prodevel at 11:28 PM on April 20

Basically, most modern hosting works the way you describe, allowing you to set up multiple domains with their own file structures. If your current hosting only allows a single domain then I'd move, even low-end stuff like Dreamhost doesn't have such a restriction and anything with a control panel such as Plesk will give you the features you need.

(Years ago I did have a hosting firm that only gave me a single folder structure and charged for extra domains to be pointed at it. I ran two separate sites by using a subfolder and adding server-side code to the home page to detect which domain to display, but if I'd had full htaccess/modrewrite support I could've used that to reroute and hide each folder structure from the other domain)
posted by malevolent at 12:00 AM on April 21