no-www redirect not working / DNS A record

Question

I'm far from an expert on this, but I'll try to be as clear as possible.

I have an eshop solution leased from a company and it's hosted on their server. I can access it thru company.com/myshop and it also allows me to set up to 3 domains that they should recognize and redirect to my specific shop from.

I registered a domain with a different company and am trying to "redirect" it to the eshop. By means of one of the following DNS entries (as they look in the admin GUI)

• * A 111.111.111.111
• *.myshop.com A 111.111.111.111
• myshop.com A 111.111.111.111

I've managed to make www.myshop.com redirect to the IP of company.com (111.111.111.111), which then goes on to do exactly what I expect it to do (ie. recognizes it comes from my domain, does some further redirects itself). However, I can't seem to make myshop.com (ie. without the www) redirect to that IP, too.

The company that I registered the domain with provides a "URL redirect" service, but google would only register the redirect request and wouldn't follow it. That's why I hope for a DNS solution to this - my assumption being I've managed to miss adding a record to the DNS; if, however, the reason lies elsewhere, I'd be happy to hear about that too. If it's a search engine friendly solution (ie the www/no-www dilemma - avoidance of double content penalties), then that's even better; have no prefference either way (www/no-www), just need it to work.

Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks

Solution

Per your response to LazyOne and paulmorriss, I can only assume that you have an incorrect DNS configuration. We can automatically rule out that it ever gets redirected to eshop just because it shows, per your description, leads to the domain company.

No where in and DNS entries that I have edited have I seen a wildcard entry (*) like you have above for your records. As anything (*) is automatically forwarded to your @ entry, in this case: company.com. Now I don't know for sure if this can affect anything, but let's go ahead and get rid of it shall we.

Now your main DNS entry, the A (Host) entry should be looking like this:

@            A            111.111.111.111

But your www record should be a CNAME (Alias) record, as it is an alias for your main domain; Thus looking like this:

www          CNAME        company.com

Now for the catch: Once the redirect is passed on, who knows what eshop's server configuration will do to the domain. It might become truncated to only show company.com or it might just stay as is, www.company.com. I can only assume that's out of your control.

Something a bit more specific to your situation: As you have posted, only 3 domains will be recognized by eshop. Is this why you choose a wildcard as one. By definition, a wildcard cannot become an alias itself. However, if you say that you can access eshop via company.com/myshop, then either the site is being hosted on your host (or you've done something extra that your not telling us... etc.), OR they can configure it to act that way. And if that's the case, then you'll never know what's working or not since they seem to be in control of things.

Comments

[paulmorriss]

I don't think you can have a DNS only solution to this. Once the DNS resolves to the IP then the browser talks to the server. The server needs to know where myshop.com lives on itself. I think you need to dig more into their URL redirect service.

[Jan Benes]

@LazyOne www.myshop.com redirects to the eshop provider IP, while myshop.com redirects to an IP that is owned by the company the domain got registered with (as per WHOIS). That is what I think needs to be remedied @paulmorriss I do not understand why something that does actually work for www.myshop.com should, in principle, not be achieveable by the same means (DNS) for myshop.com .. could you elaborate?

[LazyOne]

@HonzaB If 2 domain names (with and without www) do not point to the same IP then you possibly have 1 of the issues: 1) DNS record is not setup properly; 2) The IP for that problematic name is cached locally on your PC/router or your ISP -- check TTL (Time To Live) for that DNS record -- if it is high (few days) then you just have to wait until changes got propagated everywhere; 3) their "routing" (whatever it is) is not setup/working (for whatever reason). If you can -- post your domain name so somebody else can lookup at IPs resolved (it may work for another country)

[Jan Benes]

@LazyOne TTL is, afaik, 3600 (seconds?) - haven't made changes to the DNS in a about 5 days, so propagation should not be an issue. The domain is taciko.cz, the domain registrator (what taciko.cz redirects to) is IGNUM (217.39.49.20), the eshop's IP (what www.taciko.cz redirects to) is (81.95.98.148); thanks for the time!

[LazyOne]

@HonzaB TTL is fine (1 hour). It has to be an issue at IGNUM -- talk to them (especially about that "redirect" service) as both domain names pointing to a different IPs. I do not think we can help you here (unless someone here has an domain with them as well).

[Jan Benes]

@LazyOne Okay, thanks... could it be that one of the records in the DNS is at fault/not well-defined? Will talk to them after the weekend though, thanks! If you could put that comment as an answer, I'll be happy to accept it

[Jan Benes]

Okay, have tried, now waiting for the propagation... the DNS recrods now look like *.domain.com A 81.95.98.148 @ A 81.95.98.148 domain.com A company.com To answer your question, they have control ("configure it to act that way").

[Jan Benes]

Okay, both work now, that was quick :) Hopefully google/other search engines have no issues with this. Thank you very much! (don't have enough reputation myself to upvote you, sorry)

[fadmcrank]

They shouldn't have any problems as they are the real pointers to the site and not some type of a redirect. - No problem!