I want to move from one domain to another one that is shorter and (hopefully) easier to remember, but I also want the transition to be as seamless as possible.
I'm a coder so I know about 301 redirects and I intend to use them, but is there something easier than manually adding entries in my .htaccess file?
The website is static with the exception of the blog, which is under the /blog/ directory and powered by WordPress. I want it redirected to my new domain name. File and folder structures don't change. Isn't there some kind of wildcard thing for this?
What type of web server is the site being hosted on? If its on Apache, you can use the RedirectMatch command
Why not leave the web site unchanged, and [temporailly] let the both the old and the new domains assume the IP of the site, at the level of DNS ?
In other words.
Let the DNS setup for the existing domain as-is (for now)
have the DNS of the new domain assingn the particular server name to the IP of the web server (or preferablly to a 2nd IP, also assigned to this very site).
In a few months / whenever the old domain is soon to expire, check what residual traffic may still be using the old domain name (Old IP), and for them only, add a small piece of text somewhere in the UI to inform them of the new domain.
Related
so my issue is as follows:
I have a website, on one language pointing to a site subdomain.domain.com. I added CNAME records and it points perfectly. I now have another squarespace page that is the clone of the other one, only in a different language. Is there a way to point it to subdomain.domain.com/en , for example, and how would one go about doing this thru squarespace and my hosting sites webmin.
You can't use same subdomain for more than once. But as you own, and have access to that domain you can make different subdomain. So it can be: subdomain.domain.com and ensubdomain.domain.com or even you can have subdomain of subdomain en.subdomain.domain.com. You are probably aware where it goes. You can have something like: you.can.go.as.far.as.you.need.or.you.want.domain.com. ( be aware that you need to check with host first, what is included in your package or maybe do you have some limits)
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
We need to move a large and complex site to a new server, and we need to ensure there is minimal downtime / disruption for our members.
This is what we have in mind:
Create a new domain (e.g. oursite.club) on the new server, for testing purposes. (We're planning on doing this because the temporary URL that works with some hosts / sites does not appear to work on ours)
Upload all existing code and import all databases to the new server.
Make any changes to allow for the new server path / domain name / different database names, where necessary.
Thoroughly test the .club site.
Add the current live domain (e.g. oursite.com) to the new server as an alias of the .club domain.
Once we're confident the new site works, change the DNS of the .com to point to the new server.
Also, add htaccess redirects on the old .com site to point to the same page on the .club domain, so that the site can still be accessed by those members for whom nameservers are not yet propagated.
After everything is working and all nameservers should have propagated, we want to make the .com the "real" domain and optionally retain the .club as an alias (i.e. swap the two domains on the new server).
This is what we have in mind:
Delete the add-on domain from the new server (i.e. the .club) and the alias domain (i.e. the .com) - but leave all the code / data where it is.
Re-add the .com, but point that at the server path where the .club code was uploaded.
Re-add the .club, but as an alias of the .com (or use URL forwarding at our domain registrar).
Make sure everything still works.
Update the htaccess redirects on the old server to send .com traffic to the .com domain on the new server, just in case there are any nameservers still pointing to the old server.
Since the nameservers for the two domains are already pointing to the new server, and that won't change, we thought this would offer the fastest way of swapping these two domains around.
We've done some testing with spare domains and a default WP blog, and this seems to work, but we wanted to call on your collective experience here to ask:
A. Will this work?
B. If not, what have we forgotten to take into account?
C. If so, good, but is there a better / easier way to accomplish this (especially the bit where we flip-flop the two domain names on the new server so that the current .com domain remains as the primary one to use)? For example, would it work if we add the .com to the new server (instead of creating a .club) and then edit our local hosts file during testing? Or can we use a VirtualHost directive to help with the domain swapping?
Although we've been building / running site for many years now, this is the first time we've had to move a membership site that is business-critical and where any excessive downtime / issues will cause us and/or our members real issues.
Many thanks!
I'm not sure if I'm missing something significant here (I don't entirely understand your need to flip flop the domains at the end), so I'll quite likely change this answer depending on comments etc (or delete it if I've completely missed a point!)
My approach to this would be
Set your DNS TTL for www.example.com to a very low number, 600 seconds perhaps. Don't plan the move until your current TTL expires (from the moment you make the change)
Create website on new server,configure the site under your example.club domain and example.com
Configure the hosts file on your testing machines with the IP Address of the server, and www.example.com This way your testing machines are going to actually test the full structure of example.com.
Test against example.club if you are concerned about broken links to the new domain, but since that is only temporary, it shouldn't really matter.
when it is tested and you are confident it is working, switch the DNS over.
Once you are comfortable that everything is working as expected reset your DNS TTL to a more sane figure.
As long as your database is in sync, there would be minimal (if any) downtime from this and at the end you can simply delete the example.club reference without any impact.
Depending on the value of the site, and the impact of potential downtime it might be worth putting a load balancer between both sites, and gradually increase the traffic that is sent to the new site so you can monitor progress. (you could use a load balancer from Azure which has no restrictions on being used against external sites)
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.