OK, got myself in to a bit of a mess with my first DNN site, which I have set up on iHostASP (it has a community site but my questions are going unanswered). I need to set up sub domains/parent portals/child portals, eg uk.mydomain.org/hastings (my site will have a sub domain for each country and child portals for various cities/towns).

I looked at the tutorials both on iHostASP and here on Creative Magazine about setting up sub domains etc. I created the sub domain (uk.mydomain.org) in the control panel (no problem) and added it to the DNN portals (again no problem). However, the new portal did not display, and I probably panicked by deleting the portal within DNN.

I then created a child portal (mydomain.org/uk) but it said that a portal with that name already existed), so presumably you can't have a parent and child portal with the same name? So how do I proceed from here? Do I need to delete the sub domain from the control panel and/or delete the folders created for portal 1 (uk) and start again? Or should I just contact iHostASP direct rather than via their community site?

In this case I would contact iHost direct, they will probably get you set up much quicker than asking in their community forum.

A parent and child portal are essentially the same, the only difference is that a parent uses a domain name and a child uses a url of the main domain name.

iHost will be able to look into your current configuration and see if anything needs deleting or also see if you have just missed a setting. If they do fix it, I would ask them to explain how they set it up for you so that you can do it yourself next time.

Thanks, Lee. I 've now received a reply from staff to my query on the iHostASP fourm and I'm a little bit confused now.

He recommended that I delete the sub domain and the folder that was set up for the portal and then create a domain alias for uk.mydomain.org in the control panel rather than a sub domain, then create the parent portal as before. The more I read up on sub domains and domain alias's the more I get confused!

However, after deleting the portal folder and creating the domain alias, I then found I couldn't log in as host or admin to my site. So I've logged a support ticket and hope it wasn't something I did!

Just to let you know that the instructions I received were correct and I have now successfully created my first parent and child portals ... and a lot more confident about the whole thing now!