Multiple hostnames on a single MOSS site

Question

I have been asked if it is possible to have a sub-site of a MOSS site running a different hostname from the parent.

Say I had the following site hierachy:

• Home
• News
  • Article 1
• Sub Site
  • Pages
    • Some sub page
    • Some other sub page

Would it be possible to have the site running of www.my-moss-site.com but 'Sub Site' running off www.my-moss-sites-sub-site.com?

I know you can have multiple sites created through central admin which have different hostnames but I'm wondering if the above could also be achieved

Answer 1

No, this is only possible at the level of the Web Application. However, it might be possible if you put an ISA server (proxy server) in front of it. Now, I am no expert in the ISA server product from Microsoft - but a proxy server is the only possible solution as far as I can see. It can for instance also be employed to SSL enable SharePoint Web applications wihtout having to configure this in SharePoint.

Answer 2

The host name is tied to the Web application. You can have multiple hosts per web application using alternate access mappings, but they all point to the same content (in other words, all the lower-level items retain the same relative URLs to the different hosts: http://site1/subsite1/page.aspx is the same content as http://site2/subsite1/page.aspx).

You can use some redirecting in IIS and have an incoming URL automatically redirect to the URL of your subsite. (See Redirecting Web Sites in IIS for more information). Keep in mind that because this is an IIS configuration, you will need to backup the IIS Metabase if you want to include it in your DR plan.

Answer 3

Customise the top navigation structure for both sites and you will be able to do this. It is not much different from what you would have to do if you added a new site collection under your existing url (the new site will not get the navigation of the "parent" sites automagically).

Answer 4

One option maybe to use URL rewriting, you can add a HTTP module to rewrite the URLS’ on the way out. There's lots of articles on the subject.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/02/26/tip-trick-url-rewriting-with-asp-net.aspx

I think this is quite a big job implement in Sharepoint and you’ve also got the complication of regular expressions.

A product available (aside from IIS 7) is Helicon Tech's ISAPI Rewrite, although I was unsuccessful in getting this to work with our Sharepoint install.

Answer 5

yes it is possible using vanity urls, or the Sharepoint term Host-named site collections. See http://blogs.msdn.com/jimmiet/archive/2008/06/01/vanity-site-collection-urls.aspx for examples and the command syntax

There are problems with them the main being problems with AAM.

Answer 6

IIRF is a URL Rewriter for IIS, one of those mentioned by ScottGu in his post on the topic. It works with SharePoint, among other systems. It can let you do exactly what the original poster asked for.