Can I host only a subdomain (not a full domain name) with Tiger Technologies?

If you host a full domain name such as “example.com” with us, you can use subdomains like “blog.example.com”, too. Our setting up subdomains page has information about that.

Occasionally we’re asked a slightly different question: whether we can host only “blog.example.com”, without hosting the full “example.com” domain name or handling the overall DNS for example.com.

That’s possible, but it needs to be set up a certain way:

Setting up a real domain name first

The first thing you need is a real, fully hosted domain name on our service. Your visitors won’t know about this domain name if you don’t want them to, but it does need to exist.

So pick a new domain name like “example-extra.com” (again, normal visitors won’t see this when you’re finished) and sign up for it using our order form. Since we include free domain names with our hosting accounts, this won’t cost you anything extra.

Once you have that domain name hosted with us, set up your content as a subdomain of that new domain name. For example. if you’re eventually going to want us to handle “blog.example.com”, you should set up your blog on “blog.example-extra.com” and get it all working.

Telling us about the other domain name

Now our servers need to know how to handle incoming requests for the other subdomain, too, which is “blog.example.com” in this example.

We’ll actually set up our servers to handle “example.com” and any subdomains, but that won’t cause any problems because you’re only going to “point” the subdomain (not the whole domain name) at our servers.

To have us set this up, contact us and say:

I want to point a subdomain of another domain name at [the domain name that Tiger Technologies actually hosts, such as example-extra.com], as described on your “Hosting Only a Subdomain” page.

The other subdomain is [the other subdomain, such as blog.example.com].

We’ll set up “example.com” in our system as an “alias” only, without trying to transfer the domain name. There’s no charge for this.

Pointing the other subdomain at our servers

To “point” your subdomain at our servers, you should create a DNS CNAME record pointing at the full domain name we host. It might look like this: 

blog.example.com. IN CNAME example-extra.com.

It is vitally important that you create a CNAME record and not an A record. You should not know or care what the IP address of the real domain name is on our servers. Using a CNAME ensures that it will keep working even if an IP address changes on our end; if you use an A record instead, it will eventually stop working.

Finishing up

After you do everything described above, your subdomain will show the content on our servers. The only other thing you might need to do is clean up any links on the subdomain to make sure they point to the correct place (blog.example.com in this case).

In particular, if you set up WordPress on the subdomain, you should change the WordPress settings to make sure that links only use the domain name you want. From the WordPress Dashboard:

  1. Click Settings
  2. Click General
  3. Change both the “WordPress address (URL)” and “Site address (URL)” to the correct subdomain.

That’s all it takes!