We have 500 variations of a 10 page website ? each one owned by a
different client.

How would we go about having a script, program or database that would
know based on the domain entered which website version to pull up.

For example

www.TorontoCarDealers.com would bring up the website for our Toronto client.

The other issue is when people type in subfile or folder. The domain
in theory is always going to point to one location ? the template main
page. What happens when someone types an subfolder or file off the
original domain. For example TorontoCarDealers.com/Welcome.htm would
it be able to tell that the person is looking that specific page for
that specific client?

What would this process be called? Is there a script online we can purchase?

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Clarification of Question by jessedee-ga on 10 Jan 2006 10:38 PST

Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP

or whatever might be easier. We will not be doing this in-house. At
this point im just looking for clarification on how this could be done
so that i know who to hire and know what to expect from them.

What is your target platform (OS, Web server, Web technology etc.)?

The concept that you are describing could be done statically or dynamically.

Dynamically:
I started writing a content management system that would do exactly
what you are describing. It uses apache with mod_rewite + php + mysql.
The origninal site was www.4devz.com, but I lost track of free time. I
have a database table that saves the settings for each domain (so I
can enable/disable a site). Then based on the domain name and settings
for the default virtual template/page saved in the database I render
it out to the browser. With mod_rewrite the files don't even have to
exist on the server, they are all saved as chunks in a db table. So
there is a record for the template with varibles in it that are then
replaced with the correct content.

Statically:
You setup each one of the domain names in a virtual hosting
environment and ftp the copy of each website into each appropreit
domain folder. Webin+Virtualmin would let you do this for free.

mod_rewrite is the ONLY simple option and requires apache, for IIS
your will probably need to write an ISAPI filter, in the future IIS 7
is supposed to start supporting URL rewrite capabilities.

First of all, set up a primary domain to host the whole thing, then
use domain forwarding & masking to point all the additional domains
over to that one.

Next have your website built dynamically through a database and
considering that everything stays the same except the title and a few
text components; use variables based on the domain name to show
different text/ content depending on the domain used to reach the
page.

I had a website doing the exact same ting but it's offline now. If I
find the pages I'll post it to show you what I mean.


It's the a complicated matter it just takes a few days to work out all
the bugs, you should have no problems finding someone to do it.

Check www.bridallistings.com, www.torontobridallistings.com it's only
2 domains but essentially does what you're talking about.

good luck,