I'm developing a new website with membership. Do you think any of these has advantages or disadvantages? I thought today that a mobile version will be available and I was planning m.website.com for that but in "username.website.com" case, this won't work. On the other hand, I think website.com/username is ugly.
I need and also want to know your ideas about this.
Thanks.
From a management standpoint, username.website.com will surely be greater. You have to create a new DNS record for each user. In order to do that programatically, you are going to have to manage your DNS with a service that has a API. I am pretty sure registrars like GoDaddy do not have this. Amazon has something called Route 53 that might?
username.website.com will never work as domain names are propagated via DNS servers and through millions of network devices. Any change to the domain name takes time.
Usually, if you want to handle users you can do something like this: www.website.com/users/bob so mobile version will differ only by m. prefix.
It's a lot harder to make a script that sets up subdomains than it is to make a folder for a user.
If you have a mobile site, you could fix the m.username.domain.com by making it username.domain.com/m, if you really want the subdomain.
My half a cent.
Related
Searched the web and unable to find a solution. I have an umbraco site using IIS to host on a Windows server. Any ideas on approach to block users accessing site outside the UK? Htaccess approach would be too slow.... thank you in advance!
That's quite hard to do accurately, as you could have someone based in the UK using a European network provider, which means that they might appear to come from say Holland instead of the UK. It's also possible for people to spoof their location fairly easily if they really want to get at your site.
As Lex Li mentions there are plenty of commercial databases and tools for looking up a user's location, but the accuracy of these varies considerably, not to mention the fact that some of them only support IPv4. Any of these options are going to be slow though, as you'll have to check on every request. You also have to make sure you keep the databases up to date.
Another option would be to proxy your site through something like CloudFront or CloudFlare which both support blocking traffic by country.
We're developing a client-server game that communicates with our server in real time. During development we directed the client to the server's IP address directly.
Moving forward to release, we'd like to switch the target server IP to a domain name.
I'm looking for feedback whether we should use a sub-domain within our web-site main domain (say: server.mygame.com), or, setup a different domain for the game server (mygame-server.com).
If there is no difference either way I'd love to get feedback on that as well.
Thanks!
This question might be better asked at serverfault.com because it is not strictly related to programming...
Anyway, providing my opinion on your quesion: I'd go for a subdomain of a new game-related main domain.
Here's why: this should give you the most flexability for future changes, assuming the following thoughts:
A new domain especially for that game allows you to promote game information on the www. subdomain.
The game endpoint sits (for example) at api. which points to a different server than any of the websites (improves stability, allows different software for same ports, e.g. web servers).
You can add round-robin DNS load balancing (or any other load-balancing) later. This might be easier if this can be done on a spearate main domain.
You don't have to mess with the main company DNS entries for any game-related settings, improving the stability of both services (as they are separated).
If you might sell the game one day, and a different domain makes it easier to transfer all services and data.
Using a subdomain makes it easier in general because normally the second-level domains (like the A record for example.com) is handled by the DNS servers at a "lower" level in "DNS authority tree" (e.g. at you DNS provider), so it might be more difficult to add special features like load-balancing there.
So these are only some thoughts. Basically it should not matter which way you set up the DNS entries, but if one of the topics above applies (or otherwise sounds reasonable) then you might choose a subdomain on a new domain ;)
Im hoping you geniuses here at stackoverflow can help me with this.
Recently i had to point my domain name to a network on Ning.com to map and merge the site with the domain, so i had to add an A and CNAME record. This disconnected the link between my domain and my web host and because of this my friends cant access their email anymore. Ning doesnt offer webmail either. And im not sure if i want to use Google Apps.
Is there a way i can retain the new domain pointer to the network on Ning.com and a pointer to my web host for the webmail? Or is there any other options i can take?
Thanks you so much :)
Is it an option for you to create a new A record to a subdomain like webmail.mydomain.com?
Not sure if this qualifies as a comment or answer, depends on your situation.
This is really more of a serverfault question also, if you want to try there.
Try Google Apps. You said you weren't sure if you wanted to use GA, but there's no better way to find out than to try it. It's easy to set up and if you don't like it, you can always disable it. I have personally had a good experience using GA for webmail on a custom domain.
I'd like to know the best solutions to get a public static dns or IP adress to access a computer on a routed network (for example to access from the internet a PC in my home LAN).
I heard about no-ip and dyndns.
Are they good? which one is the best? Is it really reliable ?
This is a server fault question, but to provide an answer anyway, I use dyndns.org, it works nicely ( most routers even have auto update support built in, and for those that dont there desktop updater works just fine. )
dyndns.org seems to have amazingly reliable uptime, and i cant talk for noip as i have never used it. give them a try and see which one you like more.
There are several free dynamic DNS services like afraid.org, dynu.com etc. You may want to go with one which has an open API so that you can use it from within your application.
May be you can have a look at https://www.good-dns.net/
Very simple to use, provides a URL for automatic IP update, so suitable for dynamic IPs.
There a lot options available - as far as I know dyn.org are not free for while already. And I am using https://myonlineportal.net
But you have to test by yourself and figure out which suit best for you. Sometimes it's just the available domain name.
I want to check a particular website from various locations. For example, I see a site example.com from the US and it works fine. The colleague in Europe says he cannot see the site (gets a dns eror).
Is there any way I can check that for my self instead of asking him every time?
This is a bit of self promotion, but I built a tool to do just this that you might find useful, called GeoPeeker.
It remotely accesses a site from servers spread around the world, renders the page with webkit and sends back an image. It will also report the IP address and DNS information of the site as it appears from that location.
There are no ads, and it's very stream-lined to serve this one purpose. It's still in development, and feedback is welcome. Here's hoping somebody besides myself finds it useful!
Sometimes a website doesn't work on my PC and I want to know if it's the website or a problem local to me(e.g. my ISP, my router, etc).
The simplest way to check a website and avoid using your local network resources(and thus avoid any problems caused by them) is using a web proxy such as Proxy.org.
Well, DNS should be the same worldwide, wouldn't it? Of course it can take up to a day or so until your new DNS record is propagated around the world. So either something is wrong on your colleague's end or the DNS record still takes some time...
I usually use online DNS lookup tools for that, e.g. http://network-tools.com/
It can check your HTTP header as well. Only a proxy located in Europe would be better.
Besides using multiple proxies or proxy-networks, you might want to try the planet-lab. (And probably there are other similar institutions around).
The social solution would be to post a question on some board that you are searching for volunteers that proxy your requests. (They only have to allow for one destination in their proxy config thus the danger of becoming spam-whores is relatively low.) You should prepare credentials that ensure your partners of the authenticity of the claim that the destination is indeed your computer.
DNS info is cached at many places. If you have a server in Europe you may want to try to proxy through it
It depends on wether the locatoin is detected by different DNS resolution from different locations, or by IP address that you are browsing from.
If its by DNS, you could just modify your hosts file to point at the server used in europe. Get your friend to ping the address, to see if its different from the one yours resolves to.
To browse from a different IP address:
You can rent a VPS server. You can use putty / SSH to act as a proxy. I use this from time to time to brows from the US using a VPS server I rent in the US.
Having an account on a remote host may or may not be enough. Sadly, my dreamhost account, even though I have ssh access, does not allow proxying.
The only thing that springs to mind for this is to use a proxy server based in Europe. Either have your colleague set one up [if possible] or find a free proxy. A quick Google search came up with http://www.anonymousinet.com/ as the top result.