URL without a "www" is invalid

[ffoeg]

Hi all.

I seem to have a slight problem with the server that I am on with my hosting company.

When I add a new domain to my account (for example, if I add

example.com

to my addon domains), most things work as they should; except for one thing.

After having added

example.com

to my addon domains, if I had to visit

www.example.com

, the site would display correctly. However, should I visit

example.com

(without the

www

, I receive an error message saying that the address cannot be found.

The company I'm with is using CPanel, so I'm not too sure whether it would be an option available in CPanel, whether it is an option when the addon domain is created, or whether it is a server configuration issue.

If anyone has any help on this, I'd really appreciate. This is a problem that has been irking me for some time now!

Regards,
Geoff

[wheelie34]

Hi Geoff

As www is a subdomain of example.com, do you have an A record in the DNS control panel

[ffoeg]

To be honest, I'm not too sure.

But, under the DNS options, there is an option to "Add an A entry for your Hostname". Is that something that I'm going to be needing to use?

[wheelie34]

Well, add an A record, give it an hour (or a few) to go live then see it the domain resolves, any domain should have A records depending on what you want it to resolve to, examples: mail, www, etc

[g1smd]

Once added, make sure that one serves content and the other serves a 301 redirect, so that you can get to the content two ways, but only one of will which serve it as "200 OK".

[ffoeg]

So it's not going to mess anything up on the server? I'm not going to have any unexpected downtime or anything? I can't really afford to have any downtime :)

[wheelie34]

I take it you are running the DNS on the server? or do you have a third party domain control panel where you point the domain to the server the site is hosted on?

Adding an A record shouldn't result in downtime. Add it, see if it works then decide which version of the domain you want to resolve, IE with www or without, as g1smd states you will need to have only one version showing to the web.

[leadegroot]

No, it shouldn't create any downtime.

You're just adding more pipes to the internet.
(Sorry, guys - couldn't resist!)