Creating and Managing Subdomains

A subdomain is a prefix on the URL of your domain such as blog.yourdomain.com. You can create as many subdomains as you need in your cPanel account at Reclaim Hosting and manage the folders associated with them. For more information on the difference between subdomains and subfolders see: Subdomains and Subfolders

Finding Subdomains in cPanel

To begin you will need to login to the Client Area Portal and access cPanel for your account. Navigate to the Domains Section of cPanel and select the Domains icon.

Note: cPanel recently reconfigured icons in the Domains section, so almost all domain functions (including subdomains) are now consolidated under this one Domains icon.

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On the next window, select the Create A New Domain button in the top right-hand corner:

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Creating a Subdomain

Follow the steps outlined below to create a subdomain:

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1. Enter your preferred subdomain under the Domain field. In this case, the account domain name is lauren.stateu.org and the new subdomain will be blog.lauren.stateu.org

2. Enter the directory where you want the files for this subdomain to exist under the Document Root field. (cPanel used to put all subdomains in the public_html folder by default, but now any new subdomains will default to the root directory of the user's account).

4. Click Submit to create the subdomain. When successful, your window will redirect back to the full list of Domains in cPanel, including your newly created subdomain:

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(After a few minutes, LetsEncrypt will automatically provision an SSL certificate on the new subdomain. Once that happens, you will be able to enable the Force HTTPS toggle.) 

Modifying a Subdomain

You can view and modify all of your domains, including subdomains, from the main Domains Icon, as shown above. Click the Manage button next to the domain that you wish to modify:

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cPanel provides the ability to modify the Document Root (ie. the folder that the subdomain's files are served from), create a Redirection to redirect to a different URL (for example if you wanted facebook.yourdomain.com to redirect to your Facebook profile's URL), and to delete subdomains entirely via the Remove link.

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Final Thoughts

Subdomains can be really useful for organizing content within your domain. Whether you create separate software installations by setting up subdomains or use them to point to other projects it's a great way to structure content on your site if you're finding that different projects don't make sense to live at the same URL.

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