Cloudbric Corp. > Blog > Ask Cloudbric: Can I Also Protect My Subdomains With Cloudbric?

Ask Cloudbric: Can I Also Protect My Subdomains With Cloudbric?

2015-08-06 Blog

Cloudbric received a lot of questions about our web application security service, and in our mission to democratize cyber security, we try our best to make the information readily available. We post a lot of answers in our Help Center, but every week we will give a longer answer about one question. This week’s question is:

Can I Also Protect My Subdomains With Cloudbric?

Yes, Cloudbric can protect your domain along with any subdomains.

First, let’s talk about what a subdomain is. That’s the part of your website address that comes before your domain name. A domain name can be broken down into four parts:

  1. subdomain, or third-level domain,
  2. domain, which is also called second-level domain
  3. top-level domain (TLD), which is the *.com, *.net, *.gov, and so on, of your website
  4. if there is a backslash after the top-level domain, everything after that is the subdirectory or subfolder.
picture showing the different levels of domains
This image breaks down the main parts of a domain name.

These days, the subdomains you’re most likely to see could be blog.*, or mail.*, or m.* for mobile sites, and there are dozens more out there. You may not need Cloudbric protection for a mail or ftp subdomain, but others certainly require security. The most common subdomain is simply the “www.*” that starts off most website addresses. It’s so ubiquitous that we rarely think about what it means. You probably know it stands for “World Wide Web,” but why even bother to say that at all? It dates back to the 1990s, when the World Wide Web wasn’t the main Internet protocol — we also had freenet, ftp, pop, and so on. Nowadays these are much less commonly used, but they are all valid examples of common subdomains.

Even though your subdomains may be hosted in the same location as your domain, they aren’t considered the same website in many ways. It may affect how search engines like Google index your website. It also means that adding Cloudbric protection to your domain might not cover your subdomain as well.

When you register with Cloudbric, it automatically protects your naked domain, which is your website address without a subdomain. We also protect the www.* subdomain, but not any others. To include your subdomain, you can add it manually after logging in here.  After adding it manually, you will be provided with a new set of name servers or A-record/CNAMEs for your subdomain.

Cloudbric dashboard
A screen capture of the Cloudbric dashboard where you can register your subdomains.

You can add as many subdomains to Cloudbric as you want, and the total traffic received by all subdomains will be calculated towards your free allotted traffic of 4GB/month. As long as the cumulative amount of traffic from all of your subdomains are within 4GB each month,  your Cloudbric service is free!

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