Hello,

In my hosting site dotnetnuke is installed in the root of my account on a third party hosting service.  The question I have is as follows:

I have been toying over weather or not to construct a development environment through my computer which means I would have to by server 2003 or buying extra sql and hard drive space from my host in ordert o create a development environment on the same server as the production environment is now on in this host site.

Here is the issue I was thinking of either buying a domain pointer add on which allows you to have another domain point to the current web site which has dotnetnuke installed on its host or buy an add on that allows for the creation of unlimited subdomains.

Now here is the issue I talked to my host in regards to having a domian pointer point to a folder with in my current account and making that the defacto root of the new domain so that domain1.com would point to the acutal root of the account and domain2.ocm or subdomain.domain.ocm would point to a folder within the account and be treated as the defacto root.

Now the question at hand is the following with the dotnetnuke installation installed in the actual root of this account I have and that being the live site that has lots of traffic daily would it be possible that I could install a carbon copy of the production site into this specialized folder that would be set as the defacto root without having the web.config file of the main production site conflict with the web.config file that would be in the defacto root of the new subdomain or domain.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This question could be a bit confusing so I'll try to reword it here a little bit.  The dotnetnuke installation already on this production server is installed on the actual root of it making all folders and subfolders be encapsulated within this dotnetnuke installation.

What I am needing to do is to install another instance of this live site on the same production server within a top level folder of the account (which would fall under the encapsulation of the live dotnetnuke site) and create an add on domain or subdomain in which a top level folder in the live dotnetnuke site (let's call it development) becomes the defacto root in which this new subdomain or second domain points.  Inside this defacto root which is in actuality a top level folder of the live dotnetnuke installation I would like to set up a development site by copyingthose same folder of the live dotnetnuke site (except the development folder which is the defacto root) into the development folder which is the defacto root and going to the domain or subdomain setup for this purpose so that what ever I do in this environment would not break or in anyway effect the first dotnetnuke installation but could solely be isolated from it bieng a defacto root of the subdomain or second domain.  Of course than I would have this development installation of dotnetnuke's webconfig folder point to a different database within the same sql server as the live site is in so that what ever testing I do will effect a development database and not the live.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hopefully I have made some sense here in what I am wanting to do and so ask you first does this concept make any sense do you understand where I am getting at with this question and second would this solution to a development environment be possible unserstanding the operations of dotnetnuke and how it interacts with other web apps would a nesting dotnetnuke installation whose nesting would be nested within a defacto root be in anyway effected by the first dotnetnuke installation does making a folder a defacto root isolate it from the potential of conflicitng config files to occur thanks and if I have still been unclear with this bizzare situation please let me know how I can clairfy it further

Bo

I would recommend that you try to create a local development site. You should be able to use SQL Server Express -- it's free!