Can a subdomain point to a different hosting service?

Peter Jennings

4/2/24, 4:23 PM

We own a domain, mydomain.com, which is registered at Ionos and which has a lot of, as yet, unused storage available to it. Our main website URL has been hosted on SquareSpace since 2015, we are out of room there, our template is obsolete and the whole site is in need of a face lift.
Back on Ionos we can create a subdomain, say new.mydomain.com, but I can't quite work out if we can keep the main URL still pointing to the SquareSpace site whilst pointing the subdomain at the local Ionos storage.
I've never truly got my head around DNS records, but is this possible by creating a new CNAME record?
What we would dearly love to end up with is the current site still on SquareSpace and accessible via the main URL and extra pages, data etc hosted back on Ionos and accessible via new.mydomain.com.
Ionos also offer Wordpress as a "built in" option, could we point a subdomain at this whilst retaining the main site on SquareSpace?
Or must we just go and buy ourselves a new domain such as mydomain_new.com and point that to the Ionos storage?
Later
I had a fairly long chat with a very helpful lady at the Ionos help desk. She had to ask her colleagues, but the answer seemed to be yes. However when she created a subdomain on our account it did indeed point to our webspace at Ionos but when I did exactly the same remotely it pointed to SquareSpace! We could not explain this, but a day later both are now pointing to our webspace without anyone apparently doing anything.
This is not the end of the saga, unfortunately when you enter either of the new subdomains' URLs into a browser it gives an error "This site can’t be reached" so the link isn't complete. out webspace at Ionos contains just the ubiquitous "Hello world" index.html .
Frankly I'm scared to tamper with the subdomain settings too much in case I break the main site's connections to SquareSpace which is live and must stay working.

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Nikita Kipriyanov

4/2/24, 5:25 PM

Yes, it can. I am lazy to search ServerFault, I am **very** sure this was already answered here several times. I mean, I see no effort of finding this out by yourself.

Peter Jennings

4/3/24, 1:03 AM

@NikitaKipriyanov So spending half an hour on the phone to Ionos customer support, reading the "related" questions here (which don't IMHO answer my exact question), reading all the Ionos help guides about subdomains etc and trying a google search for various versions of my question before asking here doesn't count? And yes, the simple answer does seem to be "yes", but how to SAFELY achieve exactly what I want is another matter.

Nikita Kipriyanov

4/3/24, 3:34 AM

Well, the effort *here* is not the attempt to thoroughly list all your attempts to find an answer, but to list what you was able to find out about it and can't comprehend or put together by yourself. You talked to the support — what did they say to you but you doubt or can't find out how to do? You found out several "related" answers and you *think* none of it answer your question — so which ones and why they don't fit you? And so on. The effort is to put all your knowledge together, not to spend a half of an hour on the phone.

Nikita Kipriyanov

4/3/24, 3:43 AM

For now there is so little technical information in the question so it looks like very generic "how the DNS and HTTP works". And *that* was really explained millions of times. If you can't understand those explanations or how they relate to your particular case, at least point out which ones and what you can't understand.

Patrick Mevzek

4/3/24, 4:16 AM

"We own a domain, mydomain.com" No, you don't. First rule if you want helpful answers: have an helpful question by giving the REAL names involved. Obfuscation is useless and you are shooting yourself in the foot. Also, if your current provider is unable, to your satisfaction, to help you, since you pay it for service, maybe it should be a signal to move your business elsewhere?

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Gerald Schneider

4/3/24, 9:48 AM

I just looked at the Ionos Web UI. For both the man domain and for every sub domain you can select the usage type (wording is probably different, it's in German for me).

There are step by step instructions on how to connect a domain to SquareSpace as an external provider, but you should not need to touch that.

Just create your subdomain, for me using the Ionos webspace was the default setting, but it could be different if your main domain is somewhere else. In this case just klick the cog icon on the subdomain, click on "switch usage type" (or however it is called) and select "webspace". You will then be able to select the directory on the webspace you want to serve.

+ 1

Peter Jennings

4/3/24, 4:22 PM

Thankyou, I just wanted assurance that, if I messed about with the settings and destination of a subdomain it wouldn't effect the main domain in any way. As that would be a disaster!

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