Member Avatar for jime0726

hey guys,
i have IIS running on a couple servers at my company, one hosting our companies website and the other hosting a web portal for outside clients. now we also bought a domain name for our web portal which i guess automatically comes with a public IP. we have all web pages configured on our server thats hosting the web portal, however, we would like clients to type in the name of our other registered domain name and bring up the entire site located on this server. A. is this possible to point all pages on our server to that registered domain name we're not using, and B. if it is, how do i go about configuring that? for example, we have a site registered as, say, www.smith.com, and its not in use right now. on our IIS server thats hosting our web portal, we have to type in the address bar, the UNC path for that server and the share all the pages are on. how can i set it up that clients can type in www.smith.com and have them point to our web portal server? everything is running on w2k server and IIS 6 i think, if not 5. i tried to create another web site on our IIS and call it the name we have registered (ex. smith) and tried to put in the public IP address in the web site identification area, but that doesnt seem to be working well.

any ideas how to set this up? thanks! let me know if you need more info

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by jime0726

Dani AI

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Good to see this was resolved — ’s DNS diagnosis is exactly the piece that needed to be in place, and ’s note about the ISP adding records and doing the NAT/port forwarding confirms the working configuration. The following clarifies the common server-side details that often trip people up after DNS and routing are correct.

IIS binding and host headers: bind a site to the IP the server actually owns (or use "All Unassigned") and set the host header(s) for each hostname that must resolve to that site. In IIS 5/6 this is done from the Web Site Properties → Web Site tab → Advanced → Add… and entering the Host header value (e.g., www.smith.com). Do not bind to a public IP in IIS unless that public IP is assigned to the server’s NIC; if the public IP is NATed to an internal address, bind to the internal address or All Unassigned and let the router forward incoming traffic.

HTTPS note: IIS 6 does not support SNI, so each SSL site needs a unique IP:port/certificate. For multiple HTTPS hostnames on one machine either assign separate IPs or upgrade to a Windows/IIS version that supports SNI.

Troubleshooting checklist (quick):

  • Confirm DNS A record points to the public IP (nslookup).
  • Verify router/firewall forwards port 80/443 to the server’s internal IP.
  • Check which IPs are bound on the server (ipconfig /all) and bind IIS to those.
  • Test before DNS propagation using the hosts file on a test client.
  • Inspect IIS logs (%SystemRoot%\System32\LogFiles\w3svc*) for incoming Host headers and status codes.

Example test commands:

nslookup www.smith.com
telnet 203.0.113.5 80
curl -I http://www.smith.com/
# Windows hosts file entry (for testing, run editor as admin)
203.0.113.5 www.smith.com
ipconfig /flushdns

Operational tips: set a low DNS TTL while testing, then raise it; add both the bare domain and www as host headers or implement a 301 redirect so a single canonical name is used; isolate the site in its own app pool, harden NTFS permissions and IIS settings, and keep the server patched.

Member Avatar for Elohir

Well, for starters you need some configuration information about the domain you purchased, and the IP address you believe you have.

First, purchasing a domain does not necessarily come with an IP address, or set of IP addresses, unless you buy your domain from your ISP. What it does provide is the ability to point the domain you purchased to a DNS Server. You can either host the DNS server yourself, or have someone else provide it, but in the latter case, it is rare to find a provider that will give you enough control for anything more than the most basic DNS options.

Once you have pointed the domain to a DNS server, you then configure that DNS server to assign an IP address to each system in the domain (e.g., www.smith.com, or ). In your case, it seems that you would want to assign www.smith.com (or the purchased domain), to the existing IP address on the existing server. Once that is done, anyone who types in www.smith.com will be given the IP address of your existing server.

Please keep in mind there is a whole host of security issues related to this scenario that have not even been approached. The web server should be protected behind a firewall, and you should follow security best-practices for locking down any kind of IIS server you wish to make public. But those are topics for another thread.

For now, what you need is to determine where your DNS server is for the domain your purchased, find out how to configure it (or request changes), and then decide where you really want to publish your site (or how to protect your existing server if you keep it where it is).

Good Luck

Elohir

Member Avatar for jime0726

thanks for the response, sorry it took so long to write back but seems we've got everything rolling....we did purchase a domain from dotregistrar.com that was just sitting there, so the company we bought our t1 from we also purchased a series of IP's, one of which we werent using yet and needed that to translate into the domain we registered. so that company took care of the records and i just had to point the dns servers on dotregistrar to our t1 company. so we took care of that, then i wound up going through my firewall to forward the public IP to our internal IP on our web server. finally got all that done in the last few weeks and seems to be working pretty well....thanks for the help again!

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