Subdomains, wildcards, multisite oh my!
One of our clients bought their domain name from GoDaddy and hosts their site with us. At the time of the site launch, we only pointed the domain’s A records to our server.
Many months later, our client decided to use WordPress Multisite. We set the wildcard domains in cPanel on the server but when we went to view one of the newly created subdomains, we kept getting the error message “Oops. Google Chrome could not find oursite.com”. The subdomain was being created properly in the Network area of the Dashboard in WordPress, but wouldn’t display in the front-end.
It is so obvious to me now, but at the time, in major stress-mode, sometimes it’s tempting to just check the htaccess file a hundred times instead of trying a different route to solve the problem.
In the end, the solution was to go to GoDaddy and use the Nameservers (NS) for the server (and not the default GoDaddy Nameservers) in order for the wildcard subdomains to work properly. The A record is not enough.
I hope this prevents fewer grey hairs in the future for everyone!
