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Given http://www.ocfaustralia.org/ and site 2 http://griffith.ocfaustralia.org/, is there a way for me to tell whether site 2 is a daughter site for site 1?

That is, if I were to remove site 1 would site 2 go down as well?

The reason I'm asking is because I've been asked to do a major redesign for site 1 (the original developer's gone, left no documentations, the codes disorganized and everywhere, etc) and with the way things are, I figured it would be a lot easier and also better in the long run if I just delete everything and start again from scratch. Therefore I need to check for dependencies before pulling the plug.

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Better asked on webmasters.stackexchange.com – Oded Nov 17 '10 at 14:41
Ok will do. Thanks. :) – jon2512chua Nov 17 '10 at 15:10
Why daughter and not son? :))) – Marco Demaio Nov 17 '10 at 19:12
Mod: Possible to merge this question with webmasters.stackexchange.com/q/5552/1064 ...? – danlefree♦ Nov 17 '10 at 21:10
Questions merged – John Conde♦ Nov 18 '10 at 12:56

3 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

In your example "griffith" is a sub-domain of "ocfaustrailia.org". You could remove all the content from the ocf site and be fine with griffith. If your domain name for ocf were to expire or go down, then you would have issues.

You can set up www.mydomain.com as a primary domain, then set up client1.mydomain.com, client2.mydomain.com, blog.mydomain.com etc. They are all independent sites, usually set up with their own root folder similar to... (*nix hosts)

/public_html/index.html (this is home for mydomain.com) /public_html/client1/index.html (this is home for client 1) /public_html/client2/index.html (this is home for client 2) /public_html/blog/index.html (this is home for blog)

So long as you don't remove the directory in your /public_html/ for your sub domains, the files will remain. The setup for domain name structure is handled via DNS entries. Many ISPs have control panels like cPanel to help you set this up.

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But it's entirely possible for griffith to be on another server altogether and just registered with ocfaustralia.org as the top level domain right? – jon2512chua Nov 17 '10 at 16:37
griffith.ocfaustrailia.org could be on a different server than www.ocfaustrailia.org, but you'd need to have control over DNS to point the domains to the right server. If you're not running your DNS I don't know if it's possible. Something like cPanel that I mentioned eariler will NOT be able to set this up. – digit1001 Dec 28 '10 at 16:15
up vote 2 down vote

This is not possible to determine without examining the source code. Not only do you have to worry about the servers things are on and database connections, but you never know when another site might be relying on a feed of sorts from the first site.

Check the source code.

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Do you mean for site 1 only or for site 2 as well? Cause I only have access to the source code for site 1 only and from what I can tell, site 2 is not part of site 1. I'm not that familiar with this but is it possible for site 2 to be just registered after the domain name of site 1 given that they are related? – jon2512chua Nov 17 '10 at 15:09
The domain name doesn't really have anything to do with the site. When you register a domain name, you register it under a top-level domain, like COM or ORG. ocfaustralia.org would have been registered, and then more DNS records are set up to allow for www and griffith. If you allow your registration for ocfaustralia.org to expire, then pointers to your DNS servers where records for www and griffith go away, making sites hosted on the servers that those DNS records point to inaccessible. – Brad Nov 17 '10 at 15:50
Ok I think I got it. Thanks. :) – jon2512chua Nov 17 '10 at 16:35
up vote 0 down vote

I need to check for dependancies before pulling the plug.

Yes, you certainly do - and unless you are willing to review the content in place at ocfaustralia.org for any shared databases, include files, stylesheets, images (et cetera) hosted under the griffith.ocfaustralia.org subdomain, I would strongly suggest that you hold off on taking anything down until you have figured out all the dependencies or implemented (and tested) a complete replacement.

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