In SharePoint 2013, host-named site collections (HNSC) are
all the rage. Host-named site collections give you the ability to provide
completely different URLs for a site collection regardless of the web
application URL hosting it. For example, you might have a web application
URL named http://sharepoint.mycompany.com and under it you
have a collaboration site with a URL of http://collaborate.mycompany.com and
an Intranet site namedhttp://intranet.mycompany.com. This allows
you to host multiple types of SharePoint sites together on a single web
application which ultimately reduces the amount of resources your server farm
needs for application pools.
Just like any site collection, you have to
create a managed path for the URL you want. We do this using New-SPManagedPath.
We can add explicit or wildcard inclusions just like you can for path-based
site collections. Wildcard is the default, if you want explicit, include
the –explicit parameter. We also need to add the –HostHeader parameter
to indicate this is used with host-named site collections. Here’s an
example, where I created the business-solutions
explicit path from our example above.
New-SPManagedPath "managed path name"
-HostHeader –Explicit
This technically makes this managed path
available on any host-named site collection. If you want to see what
managed paths have been created for host-named site collections, use Get-SPManagedPath with
the –HostHeader command.
Get-SPManagedPath –HostHeader
Now, we need to create the site collection
using New-SPSite.
It takes a few parameters but the important ones for this scenario is the URL
we want for the new site collection and then –HostHeaderWebApplication to
specify which web application hosts the new site collection.
New-SPSite “Site collection URL” –HostHeaderWebApplication
“host web app URL” -Name "Site collection name" -OwnerAlias
domain\user -Template STS#0
