Help with some cpanel stuff

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The web hosting thread below was started by Wolvenmoon on 2009-10-14 14:48:06:

*Hears the "QUICK! NEWBIE! GET ‘IM FOR POSTING IN THE WRONG SECTION!"*

Wait! Hear me out first.

I use hostgator.com as my webhost. They use cpanel to manage accounts. I’m having an issue with domain names on this account.

My issue is that I have a primary domain, wolvenmoon.com, and all secondary domains work, but are also handled as a subdomain of wolvenmoon.com. So if I get randomdomain.com and put it on my account, it’ll be accessible by randomdomain.wolvenmoon.com.

I do not want people to be able to access the sites I host from a subdomain of my primary site. This has created a problem for me. I contacted their support and they said this is a behavior of cpanel that they have no control over, and if I want to change it I have to buy and pay full price for a second account. ( I can’t even refer myself to get a discount ).

So as with most things in computing I figured there had to be a way to get around it. My very basic knowledge on this subject said to do something with redirects and .htaccess, but I’m not sure what.

The behavior I want is to a wildcard of all subdomains of wolvenmoon.com ( except ones I specifically choose not to ) to go to the TLD, then for the addon domains it gets a bit trickier.

I suspect that cpanel is really redirecting hits to ‘randomdomain.com’ to ‘randomdomain.wolvenmoon.com’. So I can’t outright block access to randomdomain.wolvenmoon.com, but I know there are ways to check referrers in browsers.

So, to solve the problem, I could do a referrer check on every subdomain transparent to the end user for access to randomdomain.wolvenmoon.com of the type: ‘if referrer != randomdomain.com, redirect to TLD of wolvenmoon.com’. This would make it difficult to distinguish my addon domains from typos, unless someone spoofed their referrer, but that’s a longshot and people would have to already have some idea that I was hosting the site.

So! My question is threefold:

Does anyone have any ideas to remedy the situation that won’t cost me an arm and a leg, and can they help me do it?

Is my solution possible?

How would I implement my idea?

Thanks!

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