Create separated multi-site, multi-domain setup in Drupal

I have a hosting provider hosting my Drupal blog and website. I have no access to any webserver configuration (e.g. Apache), so I have done a multi website setup, with one codebase, separate databases as follows.
My multi-setup is this...

• I have one functional Drupal 5.1 installation for my main domain (www.mydomain.com/drupal51)
• I have various separate Drupal websites using the sites directory, each with their own database
• The different Drupal websites run at their own subdomains, like blog.mydomain.com, laotze.mydomain.com
• I am using symbolic links, not through shell (doesn't recognize "ln"-command) but either through a) php script b) ftp/scp
• I have no access to Apache's httpd.conf

So, if you have ftp access and the ability to create subdomains with your ISP, perhaps this may work too...

1) I created the subdomains though my hosting provider's control panel

Then my directory setup looked like this..

/www/www.mydomain.com/drupal51 (my Drupal install)
/www/blog.mydomain.com/ (directory, contained only a landing page)
/www/laotze.mydomain.com/ (directory, contained only a landing page)

The /www directory is the root of what's accessible to me. When entering my domain in the browser, it will look into the /www/www.mydomain.com directory for anything it can serve.

2) I created the appropriate sites directories inside the Drupal sites directory. So I had this...

/www/www.mydomain.com/drupal51/sites/www.mydomain.com
/www/www.mydomain.com/drupal51/sites/blog.mydomain.com
/www/www.mydomain.com/drupal51/sites/laotze.mydomain.com

3) I created the mySQL databases through my hosting providers control panel, using different names and passwords for each database. It might be a good idea to create a user 'admin' for all of the databases. You then only have to remember the passwords, but obviously you can do what feels right. Also it might be helpful to pick a name for the database that corresponds with the subdomain/website. For example: blogdb for the blog.mydomain.com website, etc...

4) I copied settings.php from /www/www.mydomain.com/drupal51/sites/default into each of the sites directories, created in step 2 and made the proper changes to each settings.php file. For me, only the $db_url = 'mysql://usr:pass@localhost/dbname'; line needed to be changed. I assume here that you know how to change each settings.php file. It is documented on this site, so please refer to the handbooks to check if you don't know what I am talking about here.

5) I then deleted all the directories that were created by my hosting provider, when I created the subdomains using WinSCP. SCP is similar to FTP. Works the same. WinSCP is a very small but powerful SCP client that allows you to do the same as with FTP, but FTP will do just fine. Get the latest version here... http://winscp.net/eng/index.php

6) I created symbolic links to the drupal install. I know there are many threads on this, because I have read them all :-)
I tried the "ln -s" command in SSH shell, but it was not recognized. Either my hosting provider is running a very slim version of its OS, or the number of commands are restricted (most likely the latter).

a) I tried using the PHP for creating a symbolic link. I created an empty document in notepad, and pasted in the following...
<code>
<?php
symlink ('/home/username/www',
'/home/username/www/blog.mydomain.com');
?>
</code>

I uploaded this document as createlink.php to /www/www.mydomain.com/, where it's accessible to me from the web and typed in a browser: http://www.mydomain.com/createlink.php.
When I got a white page, I entered blog.mydomain.com and I reached the Drupal welcome page, containing the Drupal steps needed when you first go to your Drupal install.

I changed createlink.php for laotze.mydomain.nl and repeated the process.

I checked using WinSCP and noticed the symbolic links, much the same as shortcuts to folders on your Windows desktop. So now I had this...

/www/www.mydomain.com/drupal51 (my Drupal install)
/www/blog.mydomain.com/ (symbolic link)
/www/laotze.mydomain.com/ (symbolic link)

b) I noticed WinSCP supports creating symbolic links, under right-click, New (ALT+F6). This is probably much easier, even when you don't have access to "ln" from a SSH shell.

In depth details on how to create (and remove) symbolic links using PHP is described here...
http://www.ideasfornet.com/how_to_create_symbolic_links_without_shell_ac...
http://www.contractwebdevelopment.com/drupal-multisite-configurations-an...

I am pretty sure there are a dozen ways of setting up multi-domain Drupal environments, but hopefully this helps someone.