Multisite subdomains without wildcards on GoDaddy: possible?

If you manually create them in your dns it might works.

GoDaddy in the past has required people to upgrade to a dedicated IP address to get this working on their servers.

If I were you I’d switch to subfolders. Remember with that setup, the main site’s permalink get a /blog/ stuffed in there.

Hi,

This is my exact question, too. I want to do a multisite setup using subdomains, but my host, 1&1, does not allow wildcard DNS on a shared plan.

Andrea-r, you mention there MAY be a way to do it if you “manually create” them in your DNS. Could you go into that more? I’m not a noob but not a pro programmer either. I was thinking that I could just manually “point” (via CNAME or something?) each subdomain to the main domain…is that what yo mean? Could you possibly explain the steps needed in order to try out that workaround?

Thanks!

Manually create the subdomain records. the cname.

Hi andrea_r,

It seems we’re straddling two posts because I asked this same question again to throw it out to more people. As I asked in the other post, could you possibly detail the steps necessary to take in the DNS settings?

Also, is this just “theoretical” or will it definitely work? I’ll have to do quite a bit of work to set up a test.

It’s just like you mentioned in another post – create the subdomain manually, point it at your install.

I say theoretically because I know it’s been done (check threads in the mu forums), I just haven’t done it myself.

WordPress only looks up the addresses in the database. the DNS work is on you.

Ok, thanks. I’ll look for those threads. I did set up a test with a multisite (subdomain) installation and pointed the CNAME of subdomain.domain.com to domain.com but with no luck. Must be missing something.

I’ve tried a couple different ways with the multisite. I’m also hosted on godaddy with an economy package. My main URL is https://galleryd.net.

Initially, I did the install with the option for subdomains; it inserted the “/blog/” into all of my post URLs, my tag pages, search results and categories. At first, this caused all of the generated links in my blog to fail (i.e., click a category or tag link, or a title permalink from the main page, and you get a 404) but it set itself up right. Although I had selected subdomains, it went ahead and installed with folders. This was fine, except when I tried to to go to the admin or login panel on the new site “https://galleryd.net/shorthandlove/wp-admin” it gives me a 404. If I change my WP-CONFIG to “define( ‘SUBDOMAIN_INSTALL’, true );” then I get a permission denied error when I try to visit https://shorthandlove.galleryd.net.

So, when using folders, I can’t access the dashboard of the secondary sites; When using subdomains, I can’t access the secondary sites at all.

My DNS settings (also on godaddy) had a wildcard option to begin with, but I’m lost when the WP Codex talks about editing Apache settings.

but I’m lost when the WP Codex talks about editing Apache settings.

Usually your host sets that part up.

I’m also hosted on godaddy with an economy package

If that’s the bottom-line one they don;t allow wildcard subdomains.

I think I’ve got it straight now. So, my hosting package doesn’t allow me access to the Apache settings, so I have to do new sites through directories; I believe the reason I couldn’t get my directories to work properly at first was because while I changed the value of “(SUBDOMAIN_INSTALL’, false);” to enable directories, my .htaccess file was not properly configured for directories, as the initial code WP gave me to paste into it was for subdomains; whenever I changed the settings to directories, no matter how I tried to reset my install, WP would never give me a new set of code to add to me .htaccess file; that is, I could never again access the TOOLS —> NETWORK menu —?it disappeared after I first enabled the MultiSite functionality. I copied a set of .htaccess from another blog I found and I was able to access all dashboards correctly using the directories model. The only thing is, on my original site, the “/blog/” directory does not appear in my posts, tag or categories URLs. This is fine, I actually prefer it this way as it’s more consistent (because even when the “/blog/” was inserted, it didn’t insert itself in pages). Will these be a problem at all? I figure so long as I don’t have a post named after a secondary site, I should be fine.

Is it possible to still map a top level domain to a new site, using the directories setup? Right now the domain for my second site, https://shorthandlove.com, just redirects.

Yes, you can use the domain mapping plugin with a subfolder setup. anywhere you read where it says you can’t, was an old post.

Sweet. I got it to work. My original site is galleryd.net , my secondary site is shorthandlove.com .

With godaddy’s economy hosting package, I was able to enable multisite functionality using directories, then install the plugin for domain mapping to give full top-level domain functionality to my wife’s site. All I had to do on the server end was change the A listing for her domain to match the IP of the primary domain. WordPress handled the rest.

Awesome!

just for information purpose.

I am running multisite blog @ 1&1 home hosting package.

it doesn’t allows wildcard subdomains.
but if you are fully in control of your subdomains you can manually create subdomins and they will work fine.

steps.
1) go to admin.1and1.com => add subdomain.
Note : keep in mind to change destination to specifc folder.

2) go to wp-admin and add a subdomain in config.
Note : i recieved 500 Internal server error on adding subdomain but still the configuration is done.

3) you might have to wait for 12hrs or more for subdomain setup to start working from 1&1 side.

Hope this info helps someone.

add subdomain.
Note : keep in mind to change destination to specifc folder.

This is the bit that’s getting to me.. I’m not quite sure exactly what that means, when I go to setup a subdomain under where you add the subdomain it says this

Specify path for files : /www/ Leave blank for default path

Is this what I change and if so what do I change it to? or do I leave blank as it states as I normally would when setting up a sub domain?

tks

Yes, that’s what you change and you you put in the path where your main wordpress install is.

Okay – I’ve added the subdomains, but this part is a little confusing to me:

2) go to wp-admin and add a subdomain in config.
Note : i recieved 500 Internal server error on adding subdomain but still the configuration is done.

Exactly what file in wp-admin is this referring to? Or is it referring to the wp-config file in the primary folder?

Any help on this will be most appreciated. Thank you!

~RCW