How do subdomains work? I have been playing around with them as a way to redirect traffic instead of using a site like tinyurl or urltea. Is this a good, bad, or indifferent idea?

Thanks in advance

 

What do you mean "how do they work?"

You type http://gay.dweezelblog.com and DNS converts it to http://111.111.111.111/whatever.htm (obviously that's an impossible IP addy.)

 

depending on your host.... the subdomain just points to another folder on your web server.

 

Let me rephrase, can they be used as a way to file data (and data will mean websites, movies, music, etc)? For example, instead of hosting a lot of files on your domain (high bandwidth costs) can you create subdomains that will redirect to the content to an unrelated party. For example http://domain.com/forums/music versus http://music.forums.domain.com.

A working example would be http://whois.dweezel.info/ which redirects to my online resume.

 

You can use subdomains several different ways. First of all, a subdomain can point to something local....ie, blah.foo.bar can point to foo.bar/blah/ or foo.bar/whatever/blah/whosie. It can also point to other locations. For example, google.foo.bar can point to google.com.

 

Thats not an impossible IP address.

 

One of my goals is to use a subdomain tag to tie into categories of my blog. For example, articles about real estate (http://davidlitsky.com/category/real+estate/) would go to http://real.estate.dweezel.info/ or something like that. I am not sure what benefits this would have (if any) regarding SEO, but figure what the hell, it's worth a shot (and costs me nothing).

 

Touche.

 

subdomains on my host simply redirect to a directory.

i.e. http://upload.spankdu.com/ = http://www.spankdu.com/upload/