Creating a subdomain - What am I doing wrong?

Question

I have a VPS (Windows Server 2008) with IIS 7.0 installed. I have a domain from godaddy.com

I created a website (outside Default site). Now I want to point test.mydomain.com to this IIS website. These are the steps I followed:

1. In IIS 7, for this site, under Bindings -> Host, I put in the subdomain test.mydomain.com as shown in the figure:

1. In GoDaddy, I went to Forward Subdomains and set it up as shown

Now in the browser, if i open up test.mydomain.com - I do see my website. However, when I click on any links, I expect to see test.mydomain.com/Test.aspx (with the page name) which I don't because it's masked. If I don't mask it, then I see the IP address in the URL.

Also, when I do mask it, when I hover on the links, I would see the links similar to http://66.xxx.xxx.xx/MyPage.aspx

How do I set up a domain correctly?

Answer 1

I'm not familar with GoDaddy, but what it looks like it's doing is creating a frame and the frame destination is set to whatever you enter under "Forward this domain to".

What you need to do is to get GoDaddy to do is to create what's called an A record for your domain name's DNS, and point that A record to your IP address.

I'm guessing that "Forwarding and Masking" is not where you want to be, and you're probably looking for something like DNS Records.

Answer 2

I believe the problem is in how DNS is configured...

What you want to do is to set up an additional 'host record' (also called an 'A record') in DNS which points to the IP address of your VPS (rather than a 'forwarded subdomain').

The host configuration you have already performed in IIS7 will use the host name you provided (e.g. test.mydomain.com) to match the request to the proper web application.