I have a main site with a bunch of subdomains created. Each subdomain is a blog and I want each blog to have its own domain name i.e.

thisguy.com -> blog1.mainsite.com thatguy.com -> blog2.mainsite.com

I bought the new domains and I set up the CNAME records as above to alias them to the appropriate subdomains. However, I get my hosts "a domain is pointing to one of our servers but we don't know anything about it" landing page.

How can I set up these domains as aliases of my subdomains?


You need these entries in the .htaccess file at the root of your hosting (i.e. where mainsite.com goes)

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^thisguy.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.thisguy.com$
RewriteRule ^/?$ "http\:\/\/blog1\.mainsite\.com" [R=301,L]

and so on for thatguy.com and blog2.

  • I get the parking page for my web host because it does not know where to go with the domain - it doesn't even get to my main site. – user745668 May 27 '11 at 16:05

This is probably an issue with your Apache setup. You'll need to add

ServerAlias thisguy.com

To the blog1.mainsite.com vhost config. It goes in the same level as ServerName.

  • That works! sort of! now I have thisguy.com aliased to mainsite.com but how do I alias it to the subdomain blog1.mainsite.com? – user745668 May 27 '11 at 20:29
  • 1
    There are two ways. You could use separate vhost files for the main domain and the subdomains (that's what I usually do). You could also use the rewrite rules that paulmorriss gave you in his answer. – Chris Ting May 27 '11 at 21:17

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