renoyote

Resolved! I’ll try to articulate what happened and what got it fixed.

I had a preexisting account on hostgator with one domain and decided to move another domain I had from Yahoo Small Business and it’s associated sub-domain to hostgator. The domain and sub-domain on Yahoo were wordpress blogs.

I put my Yahoo domain on hostgator as an addon domain and the sub-domain as a sub-domain of the addon domain.

WordPress installed just fine into the directories of both the addon domain and sub-domain. The addon domain had no issues at all but, the sub-domain did not show correctly.

This: “http://sub-domain.addon_domain.com/” always resolved to: “http://www.main_account_domain/sub-domain_directory/”

I went into wordpress general settings and changed the “WordPress address URL” from “http://www.main_account_domain/sub-domain_directory/” to:”http://sub-domain.addon_domain.com/” and immediately got “Error connecting to database”.

Sal Ferrarello suggested that I go into cPanel and change the sub-domain from a sub-domain to an addon domain and that fixed the database connection issue.

However, using the URL “http://sub-domain.addon_domain.com/” still showed up as “http://www.main_account_domain/sub-domain_directory/” in a visitor’s web browser address bar and that is not what I wanted.

To fix that issue, I had to put in a redirect from “http://www.main_account_domain/sub-domain_directory/” to “http://www.main_account_domain/sub-domain_directory/”.

I forgot the trailing slash on the redirect the first time and still had the issue until I went back in and added it.

Now, when a visitor puts “http://sub-domain.addon_domain.com/” into their browser, that is exactly the URL they see when they get to my site and the database connection is stable too.

I hope this is clear enough for it to help someone else who may experience the same issue.

Hmmmm… didn’t think of using the subdomain URL as its own add-on domain. Might give that a shot.