I’m breaking into a brave new world (for me, at least!) of making “real” websites. Until now, every site I’ve done in the last 6-7 years has been hosted either on “free” space tied to an ISP account (ie: www.homepages.isp.com/~username) or on internal company intranets.
It’s time for my very own collection of domains. I’m with a non-profit group that’s got “BigLongSillyUglyNameThat SomeoneRegisteredLastYear” in both .com and .org forms. There appear to be two sites - enter it as .org or .com, and that’s what shows up in your browser. Since it’s a pain to have to tell someone that your email address is gotpasswords@biglongsillynamethatsomeoneregisteredlastyear.com and expect them not to fat-finger it, we’re taking an acronym of the group’s name - a tidy five letters - in both .org and .com forms.
I want all four of those domains to point to the same index.html - I don’t care if the user’s browser shows what they explicitly entered, or if it all rolls to one particular domain. I just don’t want to be maintaining four identical sites - how is this done, and what is it called? I need to be able to talk (or email) intelligently with the hosting service, not to mention, know what buttons to press on the control panel, AND be able to speak intelligently to my board of directors.
It’s called “redirecting”. All you need to do is figure out which site you want to be your “main site”, then go to your registrar’s site and redirect all the other domains to the “main” domain.
Example:
I own the jimcofer.com domain. In a fit of drunkeness one night, I decided to register jimcofer.co.uk. I went to godaddy.com and registered the domain name. In a couple of hours I got the confirmation email from godaddy, so I logged in via their “control panel” and simply clicked the .co.uk domain and selected “redirect” and entered “jimcofer.com” in the “URL:” box. Now, if you enter jimcofer.co.uk in your web browser, it gets redirected to the .com site.
The registrar - Go Daddy, Network Solutions, etc. - should have an option to do this in their “control panel”. As you might imagine from my example, it onjly takes a couple of minutes to do per site, however DNS servers - the computers on the Internet that act as a “phone books” and translate your domain name into an IP address - will take 12-48 hours to update around the world.
Also, I neglected to ask: what type of email are you using? Is your ISP\hoster doing it? Or are you using something in-house like Microsoft Exchange?
If your ISP or web host is doing your mail, then you will again need to decide which is your “mail” email address. Then you will go into the control panel for each of the other domains and create rules to forward each email address to the “main” domain. This is usually a huge headache, as you will need to maintain the “master list” on the main domain and “sublists” on the 3 or 4 domains you use. So if someone quits or gets fired, you’dd have to delete their mailbox from the “main” domain server then delete the mailbox (and forwarding rules) from the other 3 or 4 domains.
If you’re using MS Exchange (or something similar), it’s much easier to use multiple domain names. In this case, you need to log on to each domain’s control panel and create an “MX record” (Mail eXchange) for the domain - the MX record will tell other email servers what your email server’s IP address is. Be sure to create the record as MX0 - you can have multiple email servers (and thus, MX records such as MX1, MX2) for redundancy purposes in case your main server goes down. You will then need to have your IT guys add the new domains as SMTP addresses in Exchange. I can tell you how to do this - it only takes about 10 minutes total - but unless you’re admining the server yourself why bother, right? However, once this is done all email from all of the domains will go to the correct mailbox if the same username is used (i.e. RealityChuck@domain1.com, RealityChuck@domain2.org, etc.)
You want them to point to the “main” domain name, not the same IP address. Your webhost can (and probably will) change the IP address of your site - if so, then all of the “links” from the other domains to the main site will be broken. Pointing the domain to a name instead of IP prevents this, although it takes a few milliseconds longer to get to your site, as the redirect will have to resolve the new name.
Rex - glad to hear that “redirecting” is pretty mindless. My hosting provider is also serving as my registrar, so that should make it even more mindless.
As for mail, we don’t have any servers, so everything is being done as aliases pointing at the various individuals’ personal email IDs, (which raises the trouble of replies coming from someone’s personal email rather than the organization) or by logging into a webmail site. We get something like 100 aliases, which is quite enough for our 10 or so directors. If we want “webmaster@ickylongname.com” “webmaster@ickylongname.org” “webmaster@shortname.com” and “webmaster@shortname.org” all to work, I’ll need to set up (and consume) four aliases per person? A minor pain, but as long as I know about it up front, I’ll at least not be surprised. Directorships are up for grabs once a year, but historically, once someone has a position, they keep it.
I’m sure we could survive easily with just longickyname.org, but having the .com will at least let people that missed the .org get to us, and the abbreviated form will help everyone, and fit better on business cards. I also want the .com versions to prevent anyone from registering them and putting up anything defamatory against us. (Have a look at www.whitehouse.com to see porn, but go to www.whitehouse.gov to see where the President lives, for example.)
