I've got a system where I need customers to do something like set a CNAME on a subdomain, e.g. site.domain.com, which forwards to output.mydomain.com. The site it refers to needs to output specific data based on the originating domain.

Can PHP's HTTP_REFERER be used reliably? I heard that this could possibly not be the case as it's browser dependent... So what should be used?

Would it be better to attempt to implement a system using wildcards and htaccess, where the client is directed to point their site.domain.com website at customer.output.mydomain.com?

Thanks for any input :)

My vote for htaccess and rewrite rules :agree:

Is there a need to redirect visitors to your domain ?

Using site.domain.com the pages are served from your server, so the PHP var $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] will have the value "site.domain.com" and you can present data for that site.

what tonyFF said.

Add site.domain.com to list of server aliases in apache configuration

ServerName output.mydomain.co
ServerAlias site.domain.com, site2.domain2.com, site3.domain3.com ...

what tonyFF said.

Add site.domain.com to list of server aliases in apache configuration

ServerName output.mydomain.co
ServerAlias site.domain.com, site2.domain2.com, site3.domain3.com ...
And create a CName entry. This method is used quite often and it's reliability is based on DNS only, not rewriting or browsers.

If you need to create CNAMEs dynamically, look at PowerDNS. Free MySQL-based DNS -- works pretty darned well.

Wildcard dns would also be fine.