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.
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I'm trying to redirect a domain to another via DNS.
I know that using IN CNAME it's posible.
www.proof.com IN CNAME www.proof-two.com.
What i need is a redirection with a path. When someone types www.proof.com, it should take them to to www.proof-two.com/path/index.htm
I know it can be done using Web Server facilities, but I need DNS redirection.
Is this possible?
No, what you ask is not possible. DNS is name resolution system and knows nothing about HTTP.
if you use AWS, a redirect like
mail.foo.com --> mail.google.com/a/foo.com
can be setup as follows:
in s3, create an empty bucket "mail.foo.com"
under Properties -> Static Website Hosting, set "redirect all requests to: mail.google.com/a/foo.com"
in route53, create an A record "mail.foo.com"
enable "alias", and set alias target to the "mail.foo.com" bucket
not a pure DNS solution, but it works ;)
But be aware of, the redirect skips all the URL parameters e.g.: ...?param1=value1¶m2=value2
I realize this is an old thread but FWIW, incase someone else is looking for a way to do this.
While dns does not understand the path portion of the url, it will understand subdomains, so instead of:
www.proof.com IN CNAME www.proof-two.com/path/index.htm
You could use:
www.proof.com IN CNAME proof.proof-two.com
then go to wherever you host proof-two.com and set it to point proof.proof-two.com to www.proof-two.com/path/index.htm.
~ there's always more than one way to skin a cat
Some providers allow this but there are no "pure" DNS solutions since DNS doesn't know anything about the protocol you're using and redirects are a feature from HTTP.
For OVH, see : https://docs.ovh.com/gb/en/domains/redirect-domain-name/
You will have to use the control panel to add your redirection. It will update your DNS zone accordingly.
Let's consider you created a redirection from foo.bar.com to foo2.bar.com/path. OVH keeps the url paths and parameters. So if you try to access foo.bar.com/hello?foo=bar, you'll be redirected to foo2.bar.com/path/hello?foo=bar.
I have a personal project that might help you in solving this issue.
It's an open source redirect solution that allows you to redirect your domain just changing your DNS settings. Link of the project: https://redirect.center/.
To redirect www.proof.com to www.proof-two.com keeping the URL parameters, just set your www DNS entry on proof.com:
www.proof.com IN CNAME www.proof-two.com.opts-uri.redirect.center.
Really it's easy with redirect.center
If you want create a CNAME as :
www.proof.com IN CNAME www.proof-two.com/path/index.htm
using redirect.center your CNAME look as canonical mode as:
www.proof.com IN CNAME www.proof-two.com.opts-slash.path.opts-slash.index.htm.redirect.center.
Now if you want redirect to https website you can add this option:
www.proof.com IN CNAME www.proof-two.com.opts-slash.path.opts-slash.index.htm.opts-https.redirect.center.
Now you can create a CNAME with the canonical mode with slash in your destiny page.
To answer the original question, no, what you want is not possible using only DNS (like everyone has stated). In addition to everything mentioned already, another option is to use a URL redirection service. These types of services can enable you to configure many different types of URL redirects depending on your needs. For example:
Forward a domain apex to a www. subdomain or vice versa
Forward a collection of domain names to a single destination (useful for forwarding domain misspellings, old company names, etc.)
Forward specific domain names to deeply linked pages (like what the OP wants)
A service that does this is EasyRedir. Full disclosure: I developed EasyRedir. There are certainly other options out there though, so I encourage you to have a look around.
DNS won't redirect the path portion of a URL, so that won't be possible.
Adding
www.proof.com IN CNAME www.proof-two.com
will direct access to www.proof.com to www.proof-two.com, where you will need to use web server config to direct users to the appropriate page.
A related work concluded all the below:
Problem:
http://a.com/p1/p2.html should go to http://B.com/p1/p2.html
today, but later when configured manually/automatically, the same
http://a.com/p1/p2.html should go to http://C.com/p1/p2.html
Answers:
DNS - converts name to IP address
Though it can do a lot of redirects, always output is IP address
DNS does not understand the path or protocol part of URL, understands domain part only, that is, a.com only is converted to IP address, so when you hit http://a.com/p1/p2.html may be converted to http://152.132.121.11/p1/p2.html
if you configure wrong in DNS, then you will get 152.132.121.11 (not http://152.132.121.11/p1/p2.html), so you would get some 400s error (400, 403, etc.)
Redirection - this is http://a.com/p1/p2.html can be converted to http://b.com/p1/p2.html
All the methods like GET, POST can work, with if any headers and body, but there is a web server is involved, it could be point of failure, so scalability and availability will be key
If you are on AWS, Route 53 -> API Gateway is possible though custom domains, internally using the Cloud front
It is possible with Amazon Certification Manager, AWS Gateway custom domains & Route53, note the us-east-1 restriction on ACM
Hope that helps someone
I will suppose you have this scenario: You have a unique webserver hosting various websites, each one is supposed to be presented by a separated domain:
http://example.com/customer1/website/page1.html
http://example.com/customer2/website/page2.html
so, the page1.html should be served by www.customer1.com and so on.
create a subdomain inside the example.com dns server (your webserver):
customer1.example.com
in your apache virtual server settings, map the subdomain to the directory that contain the web site for your customer #1, like this:
<VirtualHost *:80>
SetEnv PAGE_ID "customer1"
ServerName customer1.example.com
ServerAlias www.customer1.com
DocumentRoot /your/local/path/webserver/customer1
</VirtualHost>
please note the value for "ServerAlias", it is important for the next step-
at this point, you should be able to navigate to your customer1 website by browsing to:
customer1.example.com
In the DNS settings for customer1.com you must make a CNAME record:
CNAME=www
LOCATION=customer1.example.com
Now, you're enabled to use: www.customer1.com.
My solution to this problem was pretty simple and straight forward. All you need is an IIS server running inside the domain.
Setup CNAME in DNS to point to the IIS server, using host names in IIS to resolve several sites on a single IIS server. I'm using the same IIS server to farm out a few sub domains to external sites.
Then in IIS setup setup redirection for that site to go to your offsite site/path, in my case it was our hosted catalog that I wanted catalog.ourdomain.com to go to. From here all the tweaking is done in IIS. Be sure to enable anonymous authentication so traffic will not be blocked.
While as almost everyone stated already - it's impossible using just DNS. As a workaround I would suggest trying NGINX (http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/request_processing.html).
TL;DR - In NGINX you can create multiple virtual servers that can redirect your request based on the server name.
Ex. http://first.my-server.com redirect to place A and http://second.my-server.com redirect to place B, while both share a single physical server.
You can use htaccess rewrite mod, rewrite to the subfolder if the user is requesting one specific domain not the other.
Of course it is possible to redirect, with the following trick:
Create a new standard primary zone
Name it same as the fictive URL that you want to redirect to
Ensure that this fictive name is different than any AD DNS name
Create A record with following entries:
blank.......................A............................ip-addr-2
www.........................A............................ip-addr-2
What we have here is redirection, essentially. A valid URL will resolve based on the existing DNS primary DNS zone. A fictive URL will be redirected to ip-addr-2. What is important is that the name of this entry is blank, so it will fall down to the next entry in the record and redirect to ip-addr-2
Everyone has already stated this, and I just want to give you another option to a service that can help you. www.301redirect.it is a free service that can redirect your domain (with wildcard) to any destination url.
I want to add a disclosure as well: I'm the developer behind this service and there is a other options out there.
i have a site like twitter.com on server one and on server two i have forum, which path is like domain.com/forum
on server one i wanted to implement wild card dns and put main domain on it. but on server two i wanted to keep forum separate, i cant give sub-domain forum.domain.com, because all its links are already put in search engines and link back to domain.com/forum.
so i was wondering, how can i put domain and wild card dns on server one and still able to give path on server 2 for domain.com/forum (as sub-folder).
any ideas?
do you think htaccess can do that job? if yes, then how?
You could use htaccess and mod_rewrite so domain.com/forum actually displays pages from forum.domain.com.
Maybe something like this:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule domain.com/forum/(.+) forum.domain.com/$1
Easy - use a proxy! If you like apache you will love apache mod_proxy for your purpose.
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName maindomain.com
ServerAlias *.maindomain.com
# insert document root and general settings for this domain here
# ...
ProxyPass /forum http://forumdomain.com
ProxyPassReverse /forum http://forumdomain.com
ProxyPassReverseCookieDomain forumdomain.com maindomain.com
</VirtualHost>
This configuration makes apache do a HTTP-request to your internal domain (forumdomain.com) without notifiying the users browser of the internal location. Your Forum will be accessable at http://*.yourdomain.com/forum. Cookies and headers the forum sents will get rewritten accordingly and Search-engines will not take notice of your backend-server.
You can read more about it at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_proxy.html
Should you need to rewrite reference sin your html (href, src ...) you might google on "mod_proxy_html".
A solution like this could of course be build with other intelligent proxyservers like squid as well. You can use it to map any content from "backend servers" to your public domain.
Make sure routing is OK or set up a host-entry for your internal domain (forumdomain) with a internet ip-addresse 192.168 ...
Enjoy your site and give feedback how worked out :)
p.s.: a "RewriteRule" directive can potentially do the same thing for you but the rdirect will be visible (and executed) by the client unless you specify the "P", foricng it to do an internal proxy request. If available I would prefer the mod_proxy though as it is more versatile and allows for more configuration.
If you use a proxy on server 1 pointing to server2, you will increase the load on server 1, since all traffic will be routed through it. Besides, if server 1 goes down, nobody will be able to reach server 2 either. Of course it is possible though, but these things are to be considered.
I would suggest setting up a supdomain for server 2 anyway, like forum.domain.com, and on server 1 you set up a 301 redirect from domain.com/forum to forum.domain.com using mod_rewrite from htaccess. Using that technique, you can even redirect calls to specific links to their corresponding page on server 2. Search engines will follow the 301 and they will eventually update the index.
You can use a 301 redirect to make sure the search engine update their index with your new urls like so:
RewriteRule domain.com/forum/(.*) http://forum.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
If you've got two servers you don't really have much choice but to use a redirect (ideally a 301 Permanent redirect) to move users from domain.com/forum to forum.domain.com.
The only other way to do it would be to put a reverse proxy in front of those two servers, which reads the URL and internally directs the query to the right server, but that's then an extra piece of hardware.
Just wanted to know how we can redirect the subdomain to domain.
I have two domain which in pointing to my rails application and a subdomain
www.xyz.com
www.xyz.info
example.xyz.com
Now when the user access www.xyz.info the example.xyz.com page should open up but the address bar should be www.xyz.info.
So is it possible to redirect?
Thanks
Abhi
One approach should be to use a reverse proxy, using mod_proxy. In the configuration of www.xyz.info put
ProxyPass / http://example.xyz.com/
However, I think it would be much easier to just deploy the rails application twice, i.e. put the configuration that you have in example.xyz.com also into www.xyz.com.
I'm trying to map help.domain1.com to help.domain2.com. I've seen this on UserVoice. They let you map something.yourdomain.com to something.uservoice.com.
On domain1.com I've set up a CNAME to help.domain2.com.
It works fine but when I open help.domain1.com I get the content of domain2.com instead of help.domain2.com.
After some experimenting I've realized that this is an expected behavior.
So my question is what do I have to do on domain2.com (or maybe on domain1.com?) to have it show content of subdomain "help.domain2.com" when I navigate help.domain1.com?
(I'm using Plesk and the OS is Windows Server 2003)
I was facing the same problem for the last couple of days, and just found the solution...
In /etc/apache2/site-available/default, I had two virtual hosts, first one was for my domain, and the second one was for my sub domain. All I had to do was reverse the order of the virtual host blocks, placing the sub domain in front of the domain, and it worked! :D
I found the solution. One way would be to use a mod_rewrite rule on domain2.com and do a redirect if referrer is domain1.com. Or to assign a dedicated IP address.
HTTP/1.1 uses the Host: header to figure out which site is being requested, should there be more than one site hosted on the same IP address.
You need to ensure that the second (target) web-server is configured to expect incoming HTTP requests with the original URI in them.
I am not 100% sure how to do this in windows but in apache you just need to setup a virtual host to redirect it from the main domain to your subdomain.
you do not say if you are using IIS or apache or what the webserver is.
I imagine that what you need to do is setup a new website in IIS (not a virtual directory) and in the website tab click on advanced and edit the entry in there so that the "host header name" is the subdomain you want.
Jon Hawkins