Custom domain with www prefix doesn't load snappages site

[ngp]

Hi,

Our custom domain http://ngp.org.au works well and loads the snappages site, however, if you type http://www.ngp.org.au (note the www prefix) the site loads our old temporary website.

Is there a way to ensure typing www.ngp.org.au brings up the snappages site? Or does this have something to do with how the web hosting is set up?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

[blazingaround]

Steve and I exchanged emails about this a while ago. I think it would be nice for SnapPages to deal with www-less/www problem without having the users to change DNS. This requires mangling Apache config files and redirect directives, it's not easy to get this right.

Right now I've got two A records in my DNS, one for blah.com and one for www.blah.com and they point to the same snappages IP. This isn't a good solution for many reasons but it's acceptable for us right now.

[Steve]

It's not really something we can change on our end as it is controlled by your domain hosting company. Typically what I think happens is you point your a record to our ip address and then a cname record for the www get's pointed to the a record so you only have to manage the a record. Let me know if this makes sense or not.

[ngp]

Thanks blazingaround and Steve, your quick responses were much appreciated!

I tried to set up two A records with my web host previously but it wouldn't let me create one with the www at the front. Uploading a .htaccess file to redirect the www URLs works.

If others are having the same problem, save the following code as .htaccess and upload to the root directory of your website:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Of course you'll need to change 'example.com' to your site.

[PamelaP]

I am unclear about whether the url i have set up will replace the snap pages url or whether that is the only url that will display when I point to the snap ip address