Put a Subdomain on a Different Server

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Chris Coyier on

Over at Are My Sites Up we have a blog to keep users updated with new features, current issues and stuff like that. If, god forbid, the site were to go down, that blog wouldn’t do us a heck of a lot of good in keeping people up to date if it was on the same server.

The solution is to simply keep the blog on a different server. But I didn’t want to have the blog feel like some foreign location. So what I did was set up a subdomain of aremysitesup.com, blog.aremysitesup.com and point that domain at a different server. I had never done something like this before, so I thought I’d share how it was done.

It’s pretty straightforward really, you just need to a new A record for the domain at your domain registrant. I am using GoDaddy, so this is how it worked for me:

  1. Log into account
  2. Open the Domain Manager
  3. Click the domain you are working with
  4. Click “Total DNS Control and MX Records”
  5. The first group in this area should be A (Host), on the top right of this bar, click Add New A Record
  6. Enter the host name, in my case it was “blog.aremysitesup.com”
  7. Enter the IP address of the server you wish to point at.

Then I just set up the new subdomain at the other host (Media Temple, in this case) and that’s it!