New Domain name, same website

will this cause problems?

[Dave McClure]

Our start-up company is called "Ourname Middle East" and our domain name is ournamemiddleeast.com The website has been up for about 6 months. To shorten our email and web addresses, we've registered ournameme.com We have redirected mail by mapping one to one, e.g. [e-mail] forwards to [e-mail] so that both versions work (because we can't be losing our contacts). We also need both web addresses to work, at least for a few months, so we've set up web diversion from the new domain to the old one. This takes the form of a 100% frameset pointing to the old site. My question really is - is this a bad idea, and if so, what is the approved way of having the two sites up and running and identical during a handover period of months? We don't particularly want to buy a second lot of server space and services if it's not necessary.

[davezan]

Could you check if your current hosting allows for more than one domain name to use the
same hosting at no additional charge? Otherwise, you might want to consider upgrading
your hosting to accomodate the other name.

[vincevincevince]

You should use a 302 redirect from the old site to the new one.

[Dave McClure]

Thanks both - these are possibilities. I suppose my main question was - do I need to do anything more, as both urls work, but I suppose I do, because the new url just frames the old one, so bang goes bookmarking. I'll investigate how to do this 302 thing. More research . .

[astoever]

I was told 301 is better than 302. Anyway, if you're using PHP I might be able to help. I had that same problem earlier so I made a little PHP snippet to place in index.php (since all domains point at the same IP). It checks whether the user is on the new domain and if not enforces a 301 redirect to it.

<?
if($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']!= "www.yournewdomain.com") {
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: [yournewdomain.com...]
exit();
}
?>