Should I have my professional doman as an addon to my personal domain?

October 24, 2010 8:53 AM

How can someone find a domain I own from another domain I own, if I serve the content from domain B as an addon domain on domain A? Should I just buy two hosting accounts?

I have a personal site and I want to make a professional one. To that end I bought a domain that I'll use for professional stuff.

I have the ability to use the professional domain (B) as an 'addon' domain on my personal domain (A). You can get straight to domain B by typing in the URL for it, but also from my personal domain by typing in domainA.com/domainB.com.

Is there a way that prospective employers can trace my personal site if I use my professional site as an addon domain? My personal site is hidden from google and I periodically change the folders from which I serve content to break links from years gone by, so there's no web presence of my personal domain to link to the other one without more effort than I think people would really put in.

Will it be possible to connect the dots if I do put domainB as an addon to domainA purely from access to domainB?

I work in banking, which is a deeply conservative industry. I don't want people being able to trace my opinions on SAS or AGILE to the same person who has political and philosophical opinions. This is not a case of 'if those people don't like you as you are, fuck them'. This is a case of 'if you like having a job, you keep your mouth shut about personal things'. I've accepted that as the price of the papers.

posted by winna to Technology (5 answers total)

If both sites are hosted on the same server, people will be able to see that from the DNS records. In shared hosting situations, a number of unrelated sites are frequently run from the same IP, however, so this might not be a big deal.

I assume that the WHOIS information for both domains will be hidden or falsified.

Off the top of my head I can't think of a way that someone going to foo.com would be able to tell that it is also accessible from bar.com/foo.com, but if you're really concerned I would ask your hosting provider, who can answer with full knowledge of the details of their setup.
posted by enn at 9:10 AM on October 24, 2010

I guess I should add, and maybe this is getting a little afield of your question as stated, that generally I would worry much more about information leaking through people than through technical hosting details. Does anyone know about both your career/employer(s) and your personal site? Do you trust them to never, ever mention your site to your employer or anyone who might conceivably employ you in the future? Do you trust anyone to whom they might mention it — their boyfriends or girlfriends, your mutual friends, whatever? That is what I personally worry about in these situations, much more than employers digging through DNS records or looking at HTTP headers.
posted by enn at 9:21 AM on October 24, 2010

In shared hosting situations, a number of unrelated sites are frequently run from the same IP, however, so this might not be a big deal.

...but it's still enough "relationship" that someone who's already looking for something might decide to look a little harder.

If you're seriously concerned about this, just get the second account. Non-critical(eg. personal site) hosting is cheap. There's plenty of other stuff, like geographical hints within content, that people can use to make correlations if they're determined enough. If you can remove this question, it's that much less for anyone to work with.
posted by Su at 9:22 AM on October 24, 2010

On my hosting, the add-ons are additionally linked as a sub-domain of the primary website. So, initially "newsite.com" is referenced via "newsite.primarysite.com" until the DNS entries get propagated fully for "newsite.com". It is still later accessible via the sub-domain address though. Off the top of my head I don't recall if it's possible to remove the sub-domain from the primary site. The only way off the top of my head this should really be a problem is if you need certain thing like FTP for "newsite.com". On my hosting, the FTP login is through the primary domain name, so the FTP account is like "[e-mail]".
posted by hungrysquirrels at 4:59 PM on October 24, 2010

It doesn't matter how well hidden the domain is from google. There are services that will tell you all the domains hosted on a given IP address, which means that even if someone knew only of the professional domain they could still find the personal one due to them both being hosted on the same shared server.
posted by Rhomboid at 12:21 AM on October 25, 2010