the answer to how to make a subdomain is two clicks and i was doing those two clicks about forty times a yaer and forgeting to delete half of them after.
so there is a wildcard a record on the staging domain now pointing at one box, and runcloud makes the vhost. a new staging site is one command and a name, no dns step, and the whole thing dies when i delet the vhost. should have done it in 2019. the only downside is that a wildcard means anything.staging resolves, so the box has to anser with a 404 by default insted of the first site it finds.
Source: r/SiteManagement · by /u/heikkinen72