How to host yourdomain.com on you WebMatrix Hosting Beta account!

Jess Coburn

14 years ago

Last month we announced the AppliedI Labs environment along with a partnership we’re running with Microsoft to provide free hosting for the WebMatrix Beta tool. When signing up for an account you’d have to work with a URL like: and although this allowed you to experience WebMatrix, ASP.NET Web Pages (Razor) and a slew of other new technologies, you had to redirect visitors to this obscure, difficult to type URL.

Today, I’m pleased to announce that you can now add domain aliases to your WebMatrix Beta account and want to step you through the process of how you’d do this.

How to point your domain at your WebMatrix Beta account

Step 1. Log into your control panel at

Step 2. Select Domains & then click Add Domain

Step 3. Select Domain Alias

Step 4. Enter your domain or hostname.

If you want to point a subdomain like webmatrix.yourdomain.com you’d do it like this:

If you want to point your actual domain like www.yourdomain.com you’d do it like this:

Step 5. Add the point

You’ll want to check the “point to existing Web Site” checkbox and select the site you want to point your domain at (in this case testall) and then click the “add domain” button to add the alias.

Step 6. Update DNS for your domain.

This part is the tricky part. You’ll need to update the DNS host A record for your domain or hostname to point to the IP address: 66.252.238.19. This will be done with either your hosting provider your domain registrar.

NOTE: We’re not providing DNS hosting for the AppliedI-Labs environment, you will need to have DNS services served by some other party. If you’re domain you’re pointing is hosted with Applied Innovations for your regular domain though, we’d be happy to help you out with getting this setup

Things to remember

1. This is not a production environment and not subject to our 100% uptime guarantee. You need to understand this is a beta hosting environment and as such may experience outages not normal in a production environment.
2. While it’s safe to point your domain at your AppliedI Labs account (I’m doing this today with http://jesscoburn.com), we won’t provide standard level support, backup services or uptime guarantees for domains hosted in the AppliedI-Labs. If you’re going to point your domain at these servers you need to understand you do so at your own risk.
3. The AppliedI-Labs services are scheduled to be reset shortly after 12/31/10. Anything hosted here will be deleted at that time.
4. You are required to abide by our terms of service. If we find hosted domains are being exploited, abused or misused we will suspend said services promptly.
5. Support for AppliedI Labs hosted website can be found in the community setup for this service at:

I hope you’ll find this new addition to the labs exciting and join me in hosting personal production websites in this arena. Our hope is to generate substantial traffic to these servers and really benchmark their performance with real world traffic.