How to host sub domain on a different server?

Question

Web hosting scenario of landing page (foobar.com) built in Jekyll and hosted on Cloudcanyon. Need a sub domain (chat.foobar.com) for a chatroom to go to a different server like Heroku to run the chatroom. My research shows this could be done with a cname but I'm also implementing cloudflare.

I didnt see this question asked so I thought it might make an interesting question. From my domain carrier I am pointing the nameservers to Cloudflare but in Cloudflare for me to get this to work do I just need to create the CNAME to point to the subdomain? I cannot direct the IP because the IP is always dynamic for Heroku.

How would this be setup?

Answer 1

You need to do two things.

1. You need to point the subdomain to Heroku using a CNAME. You do that by editing your DNS records. Since you are using CloudFlare as your DNS host, you need to add a CNAME through their interfaces. They have instructions for doing so here.

2. Add the subdomain host name to your Heroku account (or wherever you eventually choose to host the chat room). When Heroku gets requests for this sub-domain, they need to know that they should be serving your content.

Answer 2

I would first set up the hosting and cnames with heroku. Then I will proceed to implement cloudflare.