Why does my link to a Subdomain not work?

Question

My hosting provider has problems. I put Drupal on a sub-domain of my site. When I try logging in or clicking a link it comes to a Internal server error. But if I navigate to the actual directory it works fine. What should I do?

Examples:

Works: sld.tld/subdomainroot/Y

Fails subdomain.sld.tld/Y

Answer 1

Pending concrete info from the logs of both the subdomain and second-level domain, my best guess is that the problem is caused by, either:

• having nested/overlapping document roots (which Apache generally does not like),
• the subdomain is misconfigured in Apache
• the Drupal install is configured to use the first web root

Generally web apps are designed to be accessed from a single web root. If you access it from another web root, the routing or URL rewrite rules could cause errors.

You really shouldn't have your domains set up like that anyway. Besides causing potential glitches, it's also insecure. I prefer a directory structure like this:

~/htdocs/domain1.tld/wwwroot
~/htdocs/domain2.tld/wwwroot
~/htdocs/sub.domain1.tld/wwwroot
~/htdocs/sub.domain2.tld/wwwroot

This way, you can keep secure files for each site/app outside of its doc root (as well as install shared libraries). In your current configuration, you could keep files above subdomainroot and it would still be accessible because it's in your parent domain's doc root.