Host Rackspace Cloud Sites Subdomain on Dropbox with .htaccess

Previously, we published on how use and host Rackspace Cloud Sites for WordPress. So, you already know how to add a domain on Rackspace Cloud Sites. Adding subdomain on Rackspace Cloud Sites works in the same way. If we want to add demo.thecustomizewindows.com, we will use the same method mentioned in the paragraph “Preparation phase 2″ in the previous article. Simply adding a new subdomain (demo.thecustomizewindows.com in our example) will add a new subdomain in your Rackspace Cloud Sites account. You can access it by using any SFTP software (WinSCP with keys for Windows).

Why we will host Rackspace Cloud Sites Subdomain on Dropbox

If you use this subdomain for some specific purpose, for example to allow users an interface to upload files or some other usage like using a form or poll or a profile page, this trick to host Rackspace Cloud Sites Subdomain on Dropbox works great as simply it saves the bandwidth and computing cycles.

What to remember not to do and to do while using� trick to host Rackspace Cloud Sites Subdomain on Dropbox

In order to respect the policies of The Rackspace Cloud and Dropbox, do not use this trick to host Rackspace Cloud Sites Subdomain on Dropbox for serving warez, adult sites etc.

Do not use this trick�to host Rackspace Cloud Sites Subdomain on Dropbox to index your articles�- it is actually violates Google’s expected webmasters’ rules as it will work as a doorway pages – it is a black hat SEO.
We have already written on how to create .htaccess file in Windows 7.

Steps to�host Rackspace Cloud Sites Subdomain on Dropbox with .htaccess

You have already created the subdomain on Rackspace, if not go ahead and create one :

Use any plan (you can not point to third party domain from the control panel) and use�Linux / Apache / PHP and nothing needed to be added more and done.

Final steps to host Rackspace Cloud Sites Subdomain on Dropbox

What we actually going to show is to point towards a plain html file. So, we have modified the default Rackspace index file and uploaded it to dropbox public folder. It is�http://db.tt/zU61UPbg for us.

Now, we went to /<root>/demo.thecustomizewindows.com/web/content/ from our SFTP software ans simply created an .htaccess file there :

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^demo.thecustomizewindows.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://db.tt/zU61UPbg/$1 [r=301,nc]
</IfModule>

This is a 301 redirect. If you type demo.thecustomizewindows.com in your browser address bar and hit Enter, you will notice that, the url is going to dropbox – within a fraction of a second.

This is a well and good technique to�host Rackspace Cloud Sites Subdomain on Dropbox, but you must create a robots file and place it in the subdomain ( demo.thecustomizewindows.com in our case) to disallow Google Crawlers to index this subdomain.

Simply create a text file and name it robots.txt and write this :

# go away
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Always add a nofollow to any hyperlink from your main domain towards this subdomain. So, we have learned how to host Rackspace Cloud Sites Subdomain on Dropbox to use simple HTML files or forms which will not use our bandwidth.
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