Migrating to same domain

It all tested out fine, and now I’m just waiting for the DNS changes to propogate (my host reckons just to set to their nameservers and all will be sorted, i’ll see how that goes).

Thanks for all your help.

Hi, you are welcome! Glad to hear it has been sorted out.

For testing it locally all you need to do is direct your web browser to a local installation. This can be done by pointing the domain to 127.0.0.1 in the hosts file. The WP installation is IP address agnostic, so you can test it literally anywhere.

George

Looking good as far as wordpress is concerned. Can’t say much about the new hosts eHost. Guess you get what you pay for, front line support wouldn’t pass the turing test and second line support insisted they set up parked domains for me and set up the wp subdomains to point to the owned domains not the correct way around and have brought down all my paying sites.

I have started a new thread but wonder what your take, george, is on parked domains, alising or redirecting?

Hi @patbell101

I just noticed this message. I’ll reply here as a follow up to the previous discussion about the domain migration.

I have started a new thread but wonder what your take, george, is on parked domains, alising or redirecting?

About domain aliasing and redirection, if this was not your initial intention, I wouldn’t recommend going ahead with any of these.

First of all, domain aliasing means that the same content is going to be available from multiple domains, which is generally considered bad practice because search engines don’t like that. The only case in which domain aliasing is useful is for the www version of a domain and even then an additional 301 redirect to either the www or the non-www version is highly recommended.

Secondly, domain redirection between different domains is only really useful when migrating your web site to a different domain, in which case you place a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new one.

To me neither domain aliasing or redirection make sense in this case, so I wouldn’t recommend them.

On the other hand, the concept of parked domains is just like regular domain hosting, but the web page that is served to visitors is just an informational page or a page with ads or a maintenance / under construction / coming soon page etc. In other words, they are just regular web sites, but not content oriented.

Since you have a multi-site, you could create a sub-site for each of the domains you would like parked, map each domain to the respective sub-site using a domain mapping plugin, and then point the domains’ A records to the multi-site’s IP address in the DNS zone. Once this is done you could use something like a static WordPress page with an informational message, or use maintenance / coming soon / plugins/themes on each sub-site.

If setting up separate web sites is too much work, you can always inject a mod-rewrite rule in the htaccess file and redirect requests to those web sites to a predefined static html file you have created. for example:

1. Make sure the A records of the domains (to be parked) point to the multi-site’s IP address.

2. Add the following in the beginning of the htaccess file.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(?:www\.)?(?:example\.com|other\.example\.net|more\.example\.org)$
RewriteRule . parked.html [L]

3. Edit the example domains with your own domains in the above rule, keeping them separated using the | character.

4. Create a file named parked.html and place it in the root directory of the wordpress installation. The file can contain any HTML template you would like to be displayed when the parked domains are visited.

That’s it.

Well, the reply ended up being quite long. I hope this is all clear.

George

Please note that the solutions posted above *will* work with domain aliasing. In fact, now that I think about it, domain aliasing is possibly going to be required, so that all domains are served by your multi-site installation (don’t really know how your environment is configured). The domain mapping plugin or the custom rewrite rule I posted above will direct each request to the relevant sub-site or parked.html.

If you need more clarification, please feel free to ask.

George

Hi George,

But perhaps I should make the situation clear. I have sites such as domainname.com that need to point to my wp subdomain domainname.patbell.co.uk. My old host allowed me to add these as parked domains. I also use WP MU domain plugin.

I wanted to park the domains as I had at my old host but my new host didn’t have a cpanel function for it, though they offered to do it for me. Which they did but the wrong way around ie pointing from my wp subdomain to the owned domain which messed up most of my websites for many hours. They then told me that I should use alias. I researched and it didn’t seem that alias was different from parking (but I think thats more in the end result rather than different names for the same thing unfortunately). I might try again and get them to park one of my sites and follow your directions but at the moment they work eg spanishinsussex.co.uk and I am loath to risk breaking them again.

I have now resolved my redirection issues, the host’s “alias” actually needed to have no redirectionto be effectively parked. I hadn’t appreciated how different hosts use terminology differently. Another respondent on another thread says their host calls it a “symlink”. It is especially confusing though when, being familiar with “parked domains” my host has help documentation saying to “click the park a domain” icon when there isn’t one and their first line support would scarcely pass the Turing test. All education though.