Twice in this past year or so, I have encountered a domain name behavior that I haven't seen since I started working with websites in 1997. The behavior is that the domain is going to another site that is totally irrelevant to the site owner. In both cases, the setup was done by someone else, and I've inherited the problem. Also, this time, I have documented most of the steps I've taken.
It's not a browser redirect compromise because I asked the site owner to load the site from their location, and they got the same results that I did.
The domain is registered with GoDaddy.
ICANN lookup shows the domain pointed to InMotionHosting's DNS, as it should be.
It seems that the domain was not added into CPanel at the time that it was pointed at the host.
How does it happen that the host had the domain pointed at another site?
After considerable thought, the closest answer I can come to is that this problem has to do with the switch from http to https. Possibly, when the site was moved to https, the .com address was not also moved, only the .org address. "The wrong site" took the former server space, so the .com, while directed to the former server space, was not directed to the same site.
This would explain why the redirects that existed in the .htaccess file were not working.
The host's tech support indicated that the .com address was pointed at a different server, but they could not ... or would not explain why. And, they seemed to have quite a challenge to direct it to the correct server and server space.
Related
I have a client who is merging two sites into one. For the time being we are just installing a WP plugin to the site to manage the handful of 301 redirects they'd like handled, rather than writing to .htaccess manually.
But in a month or two they'd like to remove the site completely. Is there a way we can redirect traffic to the new combined site once they get rid of their hosting and we no longer have access to their .htaccess?
I have seen some brief mentions of setting the DNS to something but I don't totally understand and I'm not sure if this is the right thing to do. I have not asked the client if they are holding onto the domain name. In order to point the DNS to the new site, we'd need them to still own the old domain, correct? What would I assign the values to be?
You have to own the domain to do anything with it including updating DNS name. It wouldn't be smart to let it go.
If they don't have hosting on it anymore, then they will need to do domain forwarding with DNS. It can be done with 301 or 302 status codes. This link will show you how to do it on Godaddy. If you don't have Godaddy as your registrar, just look for the instructions for your domain registar.
https://www.godaddy.com/help/manually-forwarding-or-masking-your-domain-name-422
I have setup web-hosting for the domain name, 'www.domainName.com' (forExample) and had it working fine, but when I removed the existing nameservers and placed in my web-hosting nameServers, it broke the 3rd party email hosting, which unbeknown to me was actively being used. To rectify this, my nameServers were removed, and the mail-hosting namerServers were added back:
ab1_mailNameServer_etc
ab2_mailNameServer_etc
Nothing else was changed but I now get a 'ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED' error when i venture to the 'www.domainName.com' through my browser.
I looked up the domain A-Records using MXtoolBox and it tells me that no name servers can be found, although i have an A-Record for, domainName.com & www.domainName.com that point to the correct IP. I also have the correct A-Records in my hosting, and i know this because this all worked before my hosting nameServers were removed.
My question is, can I simply add back in my web-hosting nameServers under the existing email nameServers without breaking email-hosting link?
I am a lil frightened to do so, as I cannot risk breaking the email twice in one week.
Thanks in advance peeps! ;)
After changing back to mail-hosting's nameservers, if your emails have started working, then there's no problem with DNS propagation. In this case, an error "ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED" is more likely a local computer problem and can be fixed by the flushing DNS and clearing the browse cache/cookies.
As long as primarily set nameservers (mail-hosting nameservers) are resolving correctly, adding hosting nameservers under to existing won't create any difference.
So apparently you can only have one set of nameservers (not sure if that's across the board, or just with this registrar) listed, then you need to add the 'MX entry', relevant CNAME, TXT-Records in your web hosting via cPanel and ur mail and web hosting should work in unity. Peace, hope that helps someoene, cause it took me freakn ages to find that out!
Here's the situation. Website.com is an ASP site which needs a blog that is to be Wordpress. So the website.com/blog needs to be hosted onto a php-friendly server. The company hosting the ASP site doesn't want to have anything to do with Wordpress so we have to use some of the shared hosting providers.
How do I have the Blog section placed onto an entirely different server? I've heard this is done with CNAME, but I've never used it. Most of the research I've done revolves around subdomains, but I need a subfolder mapping, and there's not much to read about putting subfolders onto different servers with a different IP and everything.
Thanks.
There are a few different options:
you can bring the traffic to your own server and then redirect to
the correct location
you can bring the traffic to your own server and then proxy it to the correct location
you can direct the traffic to the correct location either via full page or an IFRAME type mechanism
Each option has some benefits and drawbacks depending your devs knowledge level and your infrastructure. Regarding subdomains, you could use a combination approach where you, for example, use subdomain.yourdomain.com to point to a server instance (can be the same server or a totally different one) that maps the subdomain.yourdomain.com name to a specific path, usually via Host header.
A CNAME is a function in DNS that says "Whatever thing you wanted to find for this name, use the same thing for that other name instead". When you're working with web stuff the "thing" in there is nearly always an IP address.
That is, what a CNAME can do for you is to say that when a user's web browser tries to look up the IP address for website.com, it will use the IP address for someotherwebsite.com. Note the total absence of anything web-related, like subfolders, in this. CNAMEs work on whole domain names, nothing else. Since you want to serve only a part of the stuff at a particular name from another server, CNAME cannot help you. CNAME is the wrong tool for you problem. Do not taunt happy fun CNAME.
In order to serve website.com/blog from another server than website.com, you pretty much have to do some sort of reverse proxying (where the ASP site's server relays requests between the user and the Wordpress server). It's probably easier and more robust to give the Wordpress site its own name (blog.website.com or something), and redirect to that from website.com/blog, but only you can know if that's politically possible in your case.
I am completely confused the last few days with this and I still haven't found an outcome that's worked.
Basically I have a domain name without hosting at letshost.ie which is dublinplasterer.ie
I also Have one domain & hosting with godaddy for domain- shanafagan.com which is my own site for web/graphic design service.
I created a subdomain= dublinplasterer.shanafagan.com and uploaded the site files.
Basically I want for example when someone types in dublinplasterer.ie in the address bar if goes to dublinplasterer.shanafagan.com but doesn't show dublinplasterer.shanafagan.com url, stays as dublinplasterer.ie
Im not even sure if this can be done at this stage. head is melted
shanafagan.com and the subdomain dublinplasterer.shanafagan.com have the same ip so how will that work if changing dns?
Any help would be greatly appreciated , am so stuck at this stage.
If you wanted to do it this way you would need a web server for domain2.com
Search for ProxyPass.
The way you should do this is add a second domain on your web hosting (cpanel for example) and point the other domain to this web server.
If you are struggling I recommend using a solution like cPanel that is widely used and simplifies much of the process. It is common enough you can google most issues.
So normally you would have started by making an add-on domain (instead of a subdomain) which would also create it's own subdomain anyway. To do that, you go to your cPanel in GoDaddy and find add-on domain, then make it "dublinplasterer.ie" (Don't add www. to it. Even though this name is hosted elsewhere, we will later go to your DNS files at that hosting and point it to your GoDaddy's name servers and this add-on helps it direct to the right root folder) then choose your local root folder for that site (I think you can actually make this the same as your other subfolder already hosting your files and then it will just pull the same site) or you can pick a different subfolder and then make the add-on domain. This tells any request to this name server that if it is a request for "dublinplasterer.ie" it needs to send it to the subfolder you specified.
If you don't make the subfolder the same as the one you already made, you can either load the same content into your new subfolder or create a CNAME record telling this add-on to point to your subfolder instead but that is more complex so go with the other route.
Lastly, you need to go to your original hosting at letshost.ie and under your domain name find the DNS records tab. Change the name servers to match your GoDaddy ones and now (may take a day or two to show as DNS changes often take days and can't be seen immediately but you can try using a different device/computer/mobile that hasn't loaded it previously to see if it will refresh the correct dns) it should work. Even though it points to your main site name servers, the add-on domain you made receives it and directs it to the subfolder you specified on the add-on domain.
Hope that helps, let me know if it works for you.
I know this question seems pretty straight-forward, but I'm having a hard time pulling up any answers on Google / Other Forums.
A client has a few domains parked on Network Solutions - not attached to any hosting account. I'm planning to point one of the recently purchased domains to a sub-directory of our main site (hosted elsewhere) - as part of a special promotion that's running.
However, Network Solutions now charges for Web Forwarding. In hopes of avoiding an additional charge I thought I'd use the DNS settings to point the IP to the site - but that just takes the user to the main website's home-page --- and not the specific sub-directory I need it to.
Since the domains are just parked - and not associated with a hosting account, I don't have access to a .htaccess file to deal with 301 forwarding or anything there.
Any ideas? Thanks in advance!
Just point the DNS to your server and set up vhosts for each of the new domains. Then, drop in a one-line JS or PHP index file (or mod_rewrite rule) to redirect to the desired page on your main site.