Hosting Website On Openshift

I decided to migrate my web to OpenShift. It was a bit frustrating but I got it working eventually.

Things to know before taking the leap

Some domain providers don’t support CNAME changes for root domains (zimmi.cz in my case). This means you can’t simply tell your domain to serve content from OpenShift address. But what you can do is to tell your www subdomain to do so:

www.zimmi.cz CNAME hp-zimmi.rhcloud.com

Which is great until you realize you’ve just created two different websites. That’s where wwwizer lends you a hand and lets you redirect your naked domain to your www domain:

zimmi.cz A 174.129.25.170

Now everything works fine and you have your www.domain.tld up and running.

OpenShift subdomains

I wasn’t successful creating a subdomain on the same application where I run my domain. This can be easily solved by creating another application and pointing DNS to it:

posts.zimmi.cz A 174.179.25.170
www.posts.zimmi.cz CNAME posts-zimmi.rhcloud.com

Just don’t forget to handle both naked and www version. When Google reindexes new URLs (http://www.zimmi.cz/posts instead of http://posts.zimmi.cz) subdomain application might be deleted.