Is it possible to run multiple sections of a site through subdomains without using MSM? Let’s say that I have a site that hosts events in three different cities but I’d like to have one EE install so they can maintain the main site as well as the sub-sites for each city from a single control panel. A setup like this could also be useful should a client need to run a blog off a subdomain. I found this article but it seemed to be more about mirroring an existing site and converting it to a mobile version.

some examples:

http://www.madebyhippo.com/blog/view/multilingual_websites_in_expressionengine

http://erskinelabs.com/create-an-alternative-version-of-your-expressionengine-website/

Hope these help.  Good luck!

It comes close but I have my config file running above root and the updated approach from supergeekery mentioned in erskine labs article was throwing PHP errors.