I have set up my DNN install on a server with a host who has not hosted a DNN set of portal sites before

On the whole everything has been OK but now we are looking at going live and have problems getting the portals to be visible to net by use of the domain names

I have experimented with setting locally but this doesnt take into account DN Servers and I really need to be consice with my instructions for the host

On My Local development set up (localhost) I either got a page unavailable or application not found until i set the web root virtual directory to point at the dotnetnuke intallation

(I now realise I just have to put an entry into my host.txt  to solve the issue (like a local dns) but this still leaves me with www.abc.com/DotNetNuke/ and it would be nicer to not have that last directory "/dotnetnuke" string shown in the url for the home page.)

I have set up a temporay set up on the live host to try and resolve the problems but it hasnt worked

The host set up a dnn install in a directory DotNetNuke and pointed a virtual directory at it akll went well and I have a few child portals set and ready to go live.

the host set the dns up so my url looks like test.hostco.net  so all my aliases have this to start too and 
I access the default portal using

test.hostcom.net/dotnetnuke

and all seems well

child portals go along the lines of test.hostcom.net/dotnetnuke/thiscompany and test.hostcom.net/dotnetnuke/thatcompany 

Now the dns was set up so that its entry points to the new website - it has the same ip as  test.hostcom.net  eg 123.123.123.123

so the dns entry is in effect thatcompany.hostcom.net = 123.123.123.123

I tried adding and changing the alias for the child portal with out any success

SO I set up and added parent portal alias  "thatco.hostco.net" - this was set to have a home location "thatco.hostco.net" (from /Portals/portal[ID])

but all I got was path not found when browsing for thatco.hostco.net (yes I had waited a day for the DNS changes to propogate and it pings ok and with the same ip)

BUT all I get is a redirect to my default home page for the default website - (was My WebSite but have changed it)

Does anyone have anyideas as to What is going wrong please!!!!!!

I have tried the same with another server rig without the dns and found that the thatco.hostco.net  directory is set up in the dotnetnuke dir but it only contains the portal.css and  doesnt contain a default.aspx file ( I even tried copying one from one of the child portal directories but not joy)

Are there any detailed instructions I have missed (Ive read the docs I got from on the download site )?????

Dave

DNN ver 4.3  iis-6 on server 2003 sql2000