So. I am new to Winhost, but have have many clients with websites spread across many hosting providers and in house IIS solutions, etc. I have been browsing the forums and reading various postings on subdomains and subdirectories. Correct me if I am wrong, but is this a correct statement? Winhost does not have the capability currently to support subdomain Binding to a website other than root? In other words, anyone using Winhost service can not bind a subdomain to a website directory and has no alternative to redirecting a subdomain of mysubdomain.mydomain.com -> www.mydomain.com/somewebsite via code?
You actually can. On Winhost, routing the subdomain to a subdirectory is handled by 301/2 redirect not IIS. this sample code http://support.Winhost.com/KB/a649/how-to-redirect-a-subdomain-to-a-subdirectory.aspx or use simple Response.Redirect() in .NET
So you can't actually bind. You have to do it with a redirect. This is rather inefficient and doesn't work in all scenarios. It would be much more efficient to allow IIS7 to handle this rather than the code in the application. The 302 redirecting requires another round trip to the server. Browser requests site. Site returns 302 redirect. Browser then requests site at new address specified by the redirect. Site returns site content at new URL With IIS7 binding, the sequence is: Browser requests site. IIS7 knows that xxx.site.com goes to subdirectory xxx and returns that as the site root. Only one request response for the site instead of two.
Sometimes the most efficient method of doing something isn't possible (or is otherwise problematic) in a shared hosting environment.
