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Situation:

  • I have a single windows 2008 server with a single public IP address.
  • I have multiple domains with wildcard A records pointing to the single IP address.
  • I need each domain to be hosted by a different web site. (i.e. www.domain1.com by site domain1site)
  • I need domain1.com to act like www.domain1.com
  • I need each site to be able to have multiple subdomains (i.e. www.domain1.com, abc.domain1.com, xyz.domain1.com)
  • Not relevant yet here it goes, I plan to handle each subdomain by a different application hosted in the same site (i.e. application /xyz in domain1site)

However I found out that IIS7 does not support creating web sites with wildcard host name binding and setting it without any subdomain (i.e. domain1.com) does not work, even for www.domain1.com.

Is there a simple solution? Does any IIS Extension like Application Request Routing provide such capability?

edit: This server is hosted at Amazon EC2 and has one elastic IP (can not have more than one) associated.

edit2: It looks like one option is use multiple Amazon Elastic Load Balancers with multiple public addresses and point them to same machine (can only done using API or console, not using website). This may be useful in the future when we have more than one servers, but right now, is it really necessary?

How about nginx? Does anyone know if windows binaries are stable and fast like linux versions? If so, can nginx be configured as a reverse proxy to different websites hosted on the same machine using different ports and empty host name bindings for each site?

1 Answer 1

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If IIS can't do it, then I recommend a more flexible solution at the gateway using an application-layer firewall like Microsoft TMG (aka ISA) which will allow you to have as many IP's as you want in IIS and for each request coming in on a single public IP on the firewall it can look at the host header and route that to any internal IP to overcome IIS limitations. There is likely other firewalls and reverse proxy's that do it as well I'm just not familiar with them.

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  • Thanks for the suggestion. I suppose ARR can do the same since it also makes routing decision at application layer. However, even though it might solve the issue, it sounded like an overkill. BTW, this server is at AWS EC2, so I am not sure about multiple private IP addresses. And unfortunate I cannot upvote yet.
    – orcun
    Mar 19, 2011 at 17:37

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