Using CNAME/A records in combination with hosting.

Wings · 4 Apr 2010 at 23:18

Hi guys,

I've done some Googling but fail to understand something with regards to redirects.

My site (in sig) is a Zenfolio account, and as such is hosted on their site and all taken care of by them. My Zenfolio site is http://skydiving.zenfolio.com .
You have the option of using your own domain, which I took up. I have the url www.skydivingphotography.co.uk , which is part of a hosting package from Vidahost.

I set up:

www.skydivingphotography.co.uk. 14400 IN CNAME zenfolio.com

skydivingphotography.co.uk. 14400 IN A 64.62.158.18

These work fine, and my Zenfolio account now appears as www.skydivingphotography.co.uk throughout.

What I am wondering is, as Zenfolio is quite limited in content type (i.e. no videos), can I still utilise the rest of my hosting?

I.e. can I have it so that http://www.skydivingphotography.co.uk goes to http://skydiving.zenfolio.com exactly as it currently does, but http://www.skydivingphotography.co.uk/videos.html goes to a page created by me and stored on my Vidahost account (without replacing my "proper" redirects with an HTML redirect on index.html)?

I hope I have explained this well enough! I'm not a complete technomong, but admit I am struggling with the whole concept of proper redirecting. :confused:

Thanks in advance!

Tom

P.s. I know that the obvious answer is "give it a go", but I am having some ftp issues that I won't bother sorting out if it's not going to be worthwhile. Also, I'd like to gain some sort of understanding in to how this stuff works.

Pho · 4 Apr 2010 at 23:39

http://videos.skydivingphotography.co.uk/ etc would work if you can live with it?

Wings · 5 Apr 2010 at 00:42

Oh OK, good shout!
So would http://www.skydivingphotography.co.uk/videos.html not be possible?

And how would I go about uploading via ftp to a subdomain like that? Not sure how the directory structure works.

I googled it and as far as I understand, if I create a directory in my public.html folder called "videos" and into that put index.html, that index.html would appear for http://videos.skydivingphotography.co.uk/?

Thanks for the post!

Pho · 5 Apr 2010 at 02:30

As far as I'm aware, unless Zenfolio allow you to redirect certain pages back to your main site it's not possible.

You can set-up subdomains in your control panel. This should create the videos folder for you too. You can upload to it just by connecting to your site's FTP address as normal and navigating to the videos folder - putting files in here would then show up at the videos.skydivingphotography.co.uk address.

Another option would be to use a subdomain, like zen.skydivingphotography.co.uk for all of the Zenfolio content which leaves www.skydivingphotography.co.uk completely under your control and then have the index of your site forward users to zen.skydivingphotography.co.uk automatically.

Wings · 5 Apr 2010 at 09:33

OK, I'll look in to it.

Thanks very much for your time!

oddjob62 · 5 Apr 2010 at 09:58

Wings said:
I googled it and as far as I understand, if I create a directory in my public.html folder called "videos" and into that put index.html, that index.html would appear for http://videos.skydivingphotography.co.uk/?

I believe that would show up as
http://skydivingphotography.co.uk/videos

Wings · 5 Apr 2010 at 10:24

I was under the impression that that would be the implied directory structure, but the folder would in fact also be accessible as http://videos.skydivingphotography.co.uk/

Am I wrong?

Wings · 5 Apr 2010 at 11:00

Either way, Pho seems to have saved the day for me, so thanks for that.