Can I point my subdomain to my dynamic IP for a purpose of remoting?

Question

I'm planning to register a domain and get webhosting for my company but there's something i want to know. Let's say i registered "abc.com", i have few staff, and all of them are using dynamic IP address at home. Can I create a subdomain such as "staff1.abc.com" for each staff i have so it will point to their house dynamic IP? Meaning maybe by setting the their router to point to the subdomain I created for them. The reason being is to let them access their house pc by using company's subdomain even if the IP changes. Will it be slower compare to if they connect to their IP directly?

Currently some of them is using "no-ip" to access their home pc and also their IP camera.

I'm a little bit confuse the difference between subdomain and dns.

Thank you

Answer 1

Unless you provide someway for the machines they are using to automatically update the IP as it changes you can't use a "subdomain" for the purpose you describe.



When you create a subdomain, you enter the IP for the Subdomain in the DNS records. Most times that is an automatic entry of the same IP as the main domain but it can be overridden. Some control panels "ask" for the IP when the subdomain is established. If the subdomain has a separate IP an A record has to be used for the subdomain. To understand that better see

http://content.websitegear.com/article/subdomain_setup.htm



If that IP changes, the subdomain doesn't work. DNS is the "white pages" lookup between a common name and an IP record. It works in the background. All computers on the internet are addressed with an IP. The DNS system simply provides a method to convert that IP number to a common name very much like a phone book to name lookup.



No-IP services such as DynDNS.com or No-IP.com etc work by having the users machine "check in" or "call home" with the dns host so that the IP can be updated automatically. You could setup a similar system but that isn't all that easy to accomplish.

Answer 2

If you own the domain name "abc.com" then you are able to update the DNS server (whether you control the DNS or not). If you control the DNS server, you can simply add a pointer record (sometimes called an "A" record) that can resolve the domain name query from the outside world. If you do not directly control your DNS server, you can contact your ISP or company that you pay to host your DNS for you and request the change, depending on your contract plan.



The caveat to this is you have to have more than one public IP address provided by your domain registrar to make this happen. More often that not, you only get one public IP address.



In example: You own "ABC.com" and the supplied IP address is 200.101.1.105. You would have "server1.abc.com" and the correlating IP address might be 200.101.1.106, and so forth.

Answer 3

The root DNS name must point to the same IP I think. You cannot assign different IPs to a root DNS. Within your own company, you could, with maybe a high end router, re-direct the subdomains to other IP addresses. That is, all the subdomains come to your company first, then your router determines where to route the packets based on DNS name. It would require complex rule I think, unless you have some form of internal proxy server.

One exception may be to re-direct to different mail servers, many DNS records allow a separate MX record for the mail server. For my DNS, I can also specify a separate FTP IP address, but that's all...