Altaf Khatri

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How to publish or host subdomain on winhost.com?

- Altaf Khatri, Los Angeles - 04/05/2011
I recently purchased a Max package from winhost.com. The servers as per the description looked powerful. Little did I know that hosting a subdomain will be a night mare through winhost control panel. I spent several days going back and forth with the customer support but to no avail. After reading several posts on the winhost.com forums and studying about URL rewriting, I figured out how to host the subdomain through winhost.com control panel. Here, I have shared step by step details of hosting subdomain through winhost.com control panel.
Below are the steps with which you can configure your subdomain:

Create a subfolder
Connect to winhost.com through your Ftp client. Here I am using Filezilla to connect to winhost.com. You will have to create subfolder under the root folder provided to you by winhost.com. Here my account is registered for ameritexintl.com and hence the name of the root folder is ameritex. I wanted to create a new subdomain with the name publisher and hence my subdomain name is publisher. Create a subfolder with the name of your subdomain under the root folder. You can create a subfolder with different name too, but for simplicity I am using the same name.
Go to winhost control panel
Login to your winhost.com control panel. Go to Sites>Manage. You will land on site manager.
Create a subdomain
Now we will be creating subdomain using the subdomain manager option. It is represented with icon in the second item in the last row. Click subdomain manager option.
Add new subdomain
Here you will see the option - Add. Click add and create a subdomain for your website. In my case, the subdomain name will be publisher.ameritexintl.com
IIS settings to create a virtual folder
Now we will open the website through the remote IIS manager. You will need remote IIS 7 manager. Install it if you don’t have it from here.
Click connect to Site option after clicking on the globe icon towards the left.
It will ask you to connect to the winhost server remotely for your website.
You will need the following information:
1. Website ftp address
2. ftp login
3. ftp password
4. sitename – name of the domain that you are working with
After you successfully connected to your website through remote IIS manager, you will see the folder that your created earlier through filezilla. We will be making the subdomain folder as virtual folder.
Right click on the subfolder(publisher in my case), click on Deploy, Click convert to application.
Don’t forget to click Save in the IIS remote manager.

Winhost.com could have had this option to create a virtual folder in the control panel itself reducing unncessary complexity.
URL Rerouting
– Go to filezilla and get the root web.config folder. If you don’t have web.config then create a web.config file in the root folder. Remember our root folder is the one with the name of the website that you registered with winhost.com. In my case, my web.config is located in the ameritex folder. Get this file on your local.

Add the following lines to the end of your web.config. It goes in the section – system.webserver

<system.webServer>

    <validation validateIntegratedModeConfiguration="false"/>

    <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true"/>

<rewrite>

      <rules>

        <clear />



<rule name="ameritexintl-Web-publisher" enabled="true" stopProcessing="true">

          <match url="(.*)" />

          <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">

            <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^www\.publisher\.ameritexintl\.com$" />

          </conditions>

          <action type="Redirect" url="http://publisher.ameritexintl.com/{R:0}" />

        </rule>

        <rule name="ameritexintl-Web-publisher-rewrite" enabled="true" stopProcessing="true">

          <match url="(.*)" />

          <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">

            <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^(www\.)?publisher\.ameritexintl\.com$" />

            <add input="{PATH_INFO}" pattern="^/publisher/($|/)" negate="true" />

          </conditions>

          <action type="Rewrite" url="/publisher/{R:0}" />

        </rule>

      </rules>

    </rewrite>

    <urlCompression doStaticCompression="true" doDynamicCompression="true" />

</system.webServer>

I have marked the items that need to be updated as per your subdomain names.
In case you host multiple subdomains, then add the two rules shown here for each subdomain. Remember the name of the routes should be different.
Upload the file to the root of the winhost.com server using filezilla.
Very Important step
– Modification to your application for resolving javascript and stylesheet files. Use the absolute positioning of the file if referencing other folder files .
For. Eg.
Instead of using ../../foldername Use: /foldername

If you are hosting asp.net application, then you will need to update the form authentication setting in web.config. Change the
loginurl=”~/Account/Logon” timeout=”2500”/ > to
loginurl=”/Account/Logon” timeout=”2500”.
Please see I have removed the tilde(~).
Website should be up and running!
Wasn’t this tricky. I have never experienced so much complexity and using so many different tools for just deploying a single subdomain. I have spent lot of time to understand this for hosting/publishing subdomain on winhost.com. If you face any issue, please contact me on contact@altafkhatri.com
Are you fed up? - Change the host but where? Answer is right here:
If you are fed up, things don't work out and you want really simple interface, simple as this article with images and description then you can try DailyRazor hosting where I am currently hosting my websites.

You can check the performance of the website yourself. For your information, I don't have any caching enabled so everything is getting pulled from database at runtime.

The best part is, it provides more resources than winhost.com and is cheaper. By cheaper, I mean in under $7 you can host several websites(read 6 for me), unlimited subdomains with very easy set up and also have several SQL databases and latest technologies like ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight.

Best of all, I can affirm you of excellent customer service. I have never heard them complaining about my application code even when it was my application setting messing things up. They will go one step forward and try to resolve the issue instead of putting the blame on you. TAKE MY WORD FOR IT. DailyRazor rocks!

Click here to goto DailyRazor
Also, I have put in more detail regarding dailyrazor in this article. Don't forget to check out the link for step by step link to host subdomain on dailyrazor in the same article.