Creating subdomain through website?

[Pedja]

I want to make an option that my site allows visitors to create account and get subdomain named as his username automaticaly created. Has anyone done such thing on Dathorn server? How to do it?

I do not need site to exist on that subdomain. I just want to point subdomain to two DNS servers of user choice.

[Frank Hagan]

Wordpress MU (Wordpress MultiUser) does something similar, although I don't know how it does it. Since it is open source, you could take a look at it to see.

I installed it once, but needed to have Dathorn set up something with the DNS records. It worked, but it was a maintenance nightmare due to bogus signups so I abandoned it.

[ZYV]

I am afraid it is not possible to assign arbitary name servers to the subdomains. All you can do is:

1) Set up a wildcard A record for your domain (I am not sure if Dathorn will agree to reconfigure Apache for you)

2) Set up A records on subdomains for your users. I am quite sure that Dathorn would not allow this, because any zone changes will require bind reload and obviousely if you corrupt your zone that may have unpleasant cunsequences.

Although technically it is possible with DNS Tools enabled in WHM and some custom curl magic.

[AndrewT]

We can certainly setup wildcard subdomains on one of your domains but we absolutely will not allow free accounts to be available on our server like this as I understand it. It just poses a huge security risk.

[Elite]

It wont make the DNS changes but maybe wildcard sub domain and custom 404 with some logic to redirect to the users home page?

[ZYV]

Andrew, well, I meant when wildcard will be in place, his script can detect which subdomain was actually accessed and redirect to another website or provide something like frames-based redirection accordingly. If this is not going to be a free service available to anyone, say only to customers or blog users etc. I don't think it will impose security risks, nor high server ressources usage.

Elite, I was referring to something like that in (1)

[Pedja]

What I needed is not to allow hosting but just to allow people to create two DNS records in DNS to point to their own host - just want to give them option to set and use subdomains of my domain for free.

In meanwhile I found solution: there is free dns service at http://freedns.afraid.org. I've set domain there and allowed anyone to register subdomains...

Root domain is pointed to cpanel account here on Dathorn and I had to ask Andrew do to some DNS tweaking on Dathorn server, which is not possible to be done by me.

The result: I have site at the domain hosted here, and anyone can set subdomains via FreeDNS service.