No Sheep

How to Redirect WWW

// January 13th, 2006 // Technology Bits

I often get a bit twitchy when after telling someone a URL like “blogs.plymouth.edu” they type “www.blogs.plymouth.edu” and wonder why it doesn’t work. Somewhere along the line the internet community was terribly preconditioned to put “www” on the front of evey URL they encounter, regardless of what people tell them.

Another annoyance occurs when using a web application that happily allows you to use both www.theirsite.org and theirsite.org, causing major session and cookie inconsistencies as relates to which site you originally linked to as opposed to where their absolute urls point.

In response to this madness, I say stop pandering to those who love to put www on the front of things, and simultaneously avoid previously mentioned session and cookie problems, all while providing better service.

Do that with an Apache virtual host and rewrite rule just like the following:


<VirtualHost YOUR_IP>
ServerName www.YOUR_SITE.com
DocumentRoot /path/to/htdocs
ServerAlias *.YOUR_SITE.com
RedirectMatch 301 (.*) http://YOUR_SITE.com$1
</VirtualHost>


Everyone does this, and the internet will be a better place for all.
apace, redirect, www, website, hosting,web,url,virtual host, rewrite, redirectmatch

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