Using Default Profile Sources Hostname

The Hostname option to Default Profile Sources lets you choose a default profile based on the hostname that the search is accessed as. For example if you have multiple departments, each having their own site called www.dept.example.com and you created CNAME entries in your DNS so that search.dept.example.com pointed at the the Search Appliance server you could specify search as the Ignore Host Prefix and example.com as the Ignore Host Suffix and create a profile called dept which would be the default when accessed by that CNAME.

Note that the profile name should be all lower case, and that more specific entries will be tried first. In the example above it would look for valid profiles by the names search.dept.example.com, search.dept, dept.example.com, and dept in that order, and use the first one it finds.