Somewhat off topic, SEOs far less n00bish than I already know that certain directories, if they have already received and accepted a link to your main site, will often not let you submit subdomains. Ran into this challenge earlier today, so it’s still fresh in my mind. Even if your subdomain is hosted on a different IP, one can expect possible challenges.

Jim, I have a couple of such setup… do you still have questions?

THEIR WEB SERVER(domain.com)
|
DNS {– Registrar
|
YOUR WEB SERVER(subdomain.domain.com)

Add an extra “A” record to the DNS server to point to otherserver.domain.com. Point this to your server. This will leave you with the rest of the domain servers - wwwdomain.com mail.domain.com, http://ftp.domain.com, and domain.com or whatever still pointing to the old set of servers.

Setup your server to respond to otherserver.domain.com.

The thing to realise is that while hosting companies package them together, DNS and webhosting are very different things that can be seperated.

The only potential wrinkle is if the old servers control panel does not let you get to the DNS settings. In which case, go to the registrar and point the domain to a DNS server you control instead of where it is now pointing. Then copy the DNS settings from the old DNS server to your new one, and add the extra “A” record as mentioned above.

In either case (looking at http only to keep it simple) you will end up with this:

THEIR WEB SERVER(domain.com)
|
DSN

You may consider just creating a single *.domain.com as the A-record that way in the future if there are more subdomains you want to add, you do not have to keep creating more and more A-records.

NOTE: Sitelutions offers free domain DNS services even if the domain is not registered with them…

If you activate their DNS option be careful you don’t break the setup with your host as they *may* replace the name servers of your host with their own name servers in order to give you this control. As Paul says though, if there is a www record there already pointing in the right place, you don’t have to worry.

There is no reason why the host can’t do their job without having the zone but sometimes they kick up a fuss.

I’m kicking myself for not being sure on this one, but I think you maybe able to use a Cname record actually. This will point an alias of your domain to another hostname. So you maybe able to point blog.domain.com to blog.othersite.com using that?

Jim,
Not over familiar with NetSols, but I think you’re looking for DNS Manager - Advanced Tools in the domain account. Although the DNS will probably contain NS (nameserver) records, you actually want to add more A records. These point to the actual IP address of the web server - www will be pointing to the client’s current host. You will add two more - one for each sub-domain, pointing to your host/server IP (or two different IPs if you want).
The original host of www should have nothing to do.

If the domain registrar for the domains only lets you change name servers, there isn’t much you can do there there.

Equally if the host for the domain doesn’t let you add them there you’re a bit stuck.

I would point the domain name to a DNS service you control (we sell that here Jim, I can show you how it works) by changing the name servers. You should then be able to find some hosts who will host your chosen domain names (blog.domain.com or domain.com).

It’s always a good plan to keep these things in their own place rather than lumping the DNS/Hosting and domain registration all in the one place.

HTH