How do I allow a user to use their own domain name for a hosted service?

Question

I am working on an ASP.NET MVC web app that allows people to publish content, but other than publish the content to a remote server, I want to allow people to use their domain name directly. For example, the user "Tom" can have his domain name TomSite.com point to http://www.mywebapp.com/user/tom, but the sub path will also be mapped. For example, TomSite.com/path will be mapped to www.mywebapp.com/user/tom/path, and this is transparent to the web visitor. The visitor will never see "mywebapp.com" anywhere on TomSite.com.

I think Smugmug.com provides such service, to allow people to use their own domain name for the photo portfolio. I want to achieve the same result.

How can I do this? Thanks!

Answer 1

This require multiple steps.

First you have to find out how your users will configure their domain to have a CNAME record for you site. You can archieve this in a number of ways where the best is education. Making partnerships with hosting providers requires a great deal of volume.

In IIS this will require you to either add each host name manually (however this could also be archieved through scripting) or have a dedicated IP address only for you site.

There is also a need for the domain to be associated with an account. The user has to add this themselves and you would probably add a check in the interface which confirms the domain is pointed at your server. The code for this would look like (remember to include the System.Net namespace).

if (Dns.GetHostEntry("www.user.example.com").HostName == "www.example.com")
{
    // www.user.example.com is a CNAME for www.example.com
}

In you ASP.NET MVC project you need to implement routes for this particular purpose. Create a custom class inheriting from Route which also takes the domain into account.