is there a way to do this with budget shared host

[leelong]

i am not talking about dedicated or VPS but cheap shared hosting plan.

instead of say h t t p://w w w.EXAMPLE_DOMAIN.com?username=myname, i would like h t t p://myname.EXAMPLE_DOMAIN.com

kindda like dynamic sub domain i think.

been googled lots of sources and read through them, i still can't figure out an easy way to do this in shared host.

by the way, the host does allow editing of php.in, i mean there is a local copy of php.ini along side the server default one.

any one could help? i don't plan to move to VPS or dedicated any time soon.

or izzit possible at all creating so called dynamic sub-domain in shared host??

[Makdaddi]

This is possible but you'll need to be able to modify DNS A/CNAME records for the domain.

If you could add a wildcard record to the DNS zone, you could use a PHP script to 'detect' the headers from the users' browser and see what domain they typed in.

An easier way might be do to a .htaccess file and instead you could use addresses like w w w . example . c o m/username

[leelong]

An easier way might be do to a .htaccess file and instead you could use addresses like w w w . example . c o m/username

i had done that. it is like MOD Rewrite, right? very common with URL shortener script.

[leelong]

finally i solved the "problem" with a 1-dollar shared host.

now i can create dynamic subdomain like h t t p://w w w.EXAMPLE_DOMAIN.com?username=myname into h t t p://myname.EXAMPLE_DOMAIN.com

whew!! it is in fact very easy to do...shame on me!!

all we need to do is to add * as subdomain in cPanel 'subdomain' menu, then set the newly created '*' subdomain point to a script file, for example 'redirect.php'

and i hv the file redirect.php like that:--

<?php

$hostname = $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'];
$subdomain = substr($hostname, 0, strpos($hostname, '.'));

header("location: http://EXAMPLE_DOMAIN.com/index.php?username=$subdomain");

?>

very easy as long as the host has built in support for wildcard subdomain.

and i tested it on a 1-dollar cheap shared host.

[crmalibu]

don't forget about subdomains like foo.bar.baz.example.com when you parse it

[leelong]

don't forget about subdomains like foo.bar.baz.example.com when you parse it

well what i need is only to redirect referral link and hv a nicer URL like http://membername.E X A M P L E_DOMAIN.com ,

instead of http://E X A M P L E_DOMAIN.com/?ref=membername

parsing foo.bar.baz.example.com with regular expression is overkill.

or could you please write a function to parse every possible url string?