How can i allow the user to point their custom domains to sub domains in my asp.net MVCapplication? [As seesn in Posterous.com]

Question

I am looking for a posterous like custom domain management for the users. The user can register a domain and should be able to point their new domain to their sub domain in the web application. Any ideas?. NOTE: I am not looking for a serverfault.com like answer but a programatic one as it is done in posterous.com.

Answer 1

The first thing is, your application will need to accept all requests on its IP Address (or at least all requests for the domains you intend to handle, all is probably easier to maintain). This way, when the request arrives at the application you can examine the Host header and determine which user this is assigned to, serving the relevant page.

On the user side, they will need to register their domain with your service (so you know which users profile to serve when a request for that domain comes in) and configure the DNS for that domain to point to your IP address.

Once the user has pointed their domain at your server and you know which domain belongs to which user, it should be fairly similar to the handling of subdomains (which it sounds like you're already doing?)

That's probably fairly vague and not MVC.NET specific, but hopefully points you in the right direction.