One of the most useful features offered by some web hosting companies, is the option of creating sub-domains in the same web hosting account. The problem is, most website owners are not aware of why and how to create sub-domains.

A sub-domain is a web address pointing to a sub directory within the main website directory. The website consists of files organized in directories and and sub-directories.

A directory in a website is a folder in the web hosting account. The main website files reside in a folder called the /WWW folder, and this is accessed when someone types the URL which is the domain with a http://www in the beginning This where the home page of the website and other pages, like contact us, reside.

Suppose that you start expanding your website from couple pages to tens or more, and you want to add to your website different categories of information, how would you organize the information?. For example, if your website is used for business reasons, and you have to add sales, inventory, and other department information,

This is when sub-domains come into play. They serve to organize your web pages in different directories in order to make the website maintenance mush easier. Imagine you have hundred web pages in your website placed in the /www directory, this means every time you want to edit a webpage, you have to go through the hundred web pages.

Here is the solution to this problem:

You create directories within the main directory with the names implying what they represent. So, you create a sales, inventory, news and other directories in the /www directory Then you add all sales web pages in the /www/sales directory, and the other web pages to the directories where they belong.

After organizing the web pages within sub-directories, someone in the sales department will be able to type the URL addrerss sales.company.com, and will be transferred the the sales sub-directory of the main website. Notice, that you don't have to use the www in the beginning of he address.

Another important benefits of the sub-domains is the ability to create many websites within one web hosting account. After creating sub-domains, you buy separate domains and point them to a specific sub-directory.

For example, the sub-domain sales.company.com can have a totally independent domain from company.com. You can purchase a domain, like www.companysales.com pointing to the same sub-directory.

In summary, if you aren't using sub-domains, you will not be able to expand your website easily beyond 30 pages. also, you will not be able to take advantage of the web server storage you get with your web-hosting account. Today, you can easily get a 500 MB. storage. If you have few pages only, you might be using 5-20 MB and leaving over 450 unused.

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