Setting up a "real" subdomain with Go Daddy

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If you've searched online for this, you won't really find a clear answer. At least that was my experience. After a few days of searching and speaking with 4 different techs at Go Daddy, I was finally able to get my subdomain up and running.

Disclaimer: I'm not a developer and some of this info may be a little off, take it with a grain of salt haha. Plus, this is more helpful if you have both your domain and your hosting with Go Daddy.

How Go Daddy treats subdomains:

If you go into your hosting manager on Go Daddy, and Add a Subdomain, this really doesn't create, what I refer to, as a "real subdomain". It's really a faux subdomain that just forwards users to a folder of your main site, e.g. www.mobile.example.com will take you to www.example.com/mobile, not keep you at www.mobile.example.com. Technically, I guess it's a subdomain, but this is not what I wanted.

Go Daddy's help pages on setting up your subdomain don't really tell you this. They say, go to your hosting control center, click domain management, choose your domain, click Add Subdomain, and you're done, hooray!

Not really. At least not if you want people to stay on that particular subdomain, like www.mobile.example.com. If you're fine with having it forward to the /mobile folder of your main site, then fine, you're good. I wanted to track my subdomain as it's own unique url or domain. Plus, I wanted a dedicated google analytics page set up for this domain (which I'm sure I could set up a condition on there to track). This was more just a personal preference thing. I wanted people to stay at the subdomain address.

Go Daddy can't do this with an ECONOMY plan, you must have a DELUXE hosting plan. It took 4 of their techs to realize why my subdomain wasn't working right. One of their more knowledgeable guys finally found the problem and walked me through, setting up a "real subdomain".

Setting up your "real subdomain" with Go Daddy:

• First, make sure you have deluxe hosting account. Even though they say that you can have up to 25 subdomains with a economy plan, those are the "faux" ones I'm talking about. According to them, I wanted "multiple web sites" on the same hosting account and I needed to have the deluxe plan for that. Cost me $20 more a year and they gave me 20% discount.
• Go to your Hosting Control Center. Click Domain Managment, click Add Domain, enter the address (without the http://www), e.g. mobile.example.com and the folder name, e.g. /mobile, click Ok.
• After that's set-up, go back to the Go Daddy account homepage, click Domain Manager, click your domain, then click Total DNS Control in the lower center column.
• Here you'll set up a new A Record for your subdomain. Click the Add New A Record button in the top right.
• Under Host Name, enter in the name you want for your subdomain, e.g. for www.mobile.example.com, just enter, mobile.
• Under Points to IP Address, enter the same IP address you have for your main site.
• Bam, your done! Now just wait 4-6 hours (possibly up to 24 hrs) to propagate, and you should be live.

Another dumb thing I couldn't find online either was:

Where do I put the html, css, and image files for my subdomain?!

And what do I call the html pages?

• Create a sub folder on your root level of your site.
• Name it the same name as your subdomain, e.g. /mobile
• Put an index.html file in this folder, that will be your "homepage" for the subdomain.
• Create a images folder within this folder hold your images for the subdomain.
• Create a stylesheets folder as well if you'd like to put your css there too.

So, now when someone visits your subdomain, they'll STAY at that address, it'll look for the files in your e.g. /mobile folder, and they should see your site! I hope this helped you. If anyone has corrections to my post, please, by all means put it in the comments. Good luck.