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I am setting up a server to host an application which will be on a subdomain, let's say "application.foo.com". "foo.com" is hosted on a completely different server, points to a different IP, etc.

Do I want the FQDN for my new server to be based off the domain, such as "theserver.foo.com", or based off of the subdomain, such as "theserver.application.foo.com"?

Does it even make any particular difference? The application is a LAMP stack application which should be connecting to some sort of external mailserver.

Dave Stern
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    Is the application dependent on the host name? If not, then name the server whatever you like. – joeqwerty Oct 10 '13 at 15:39
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    I don't believe it is. I added a few application specific details above if they help clarify, but overall, what in broad strokes would make an application FQDN dependent? – Dave Stern Oct 10 '13 at 16:23

2 Answers2

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This doesn't make a lick of difference. However, one useful naming strategy is to assign your machines name records that are broadly indicative of their main use, ie, web01,web02,db01,mail01 and then use CNAME records to point the names of particular services to those machines, for example www, ftp, mysql.

So, for example, in your case, you could create an A record giving an IP to theserver.foo.com

You could then create a CNAME record application.foo.com that points to the name theserver.foo.com

One day when you decide to host application2 on theserver.foo.com you can create a CNAME that points application2.foo.com to the name theserver.foo.com

If you ever need to move the application to a different server, say, server2.foo.com you can just change the CNAME record for application.foo.com to point to server2.foo.com instead of theserver.foo.com

Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNAME

Cillier
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Sandman4
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