With Plesk, there is a "www" option which will automatically convert all http://domain.com/ requests to http://www.domain.com/

So http://domain.com/folder/page.html would auto-convert to http://www.domain.com/folder/page.html

How do I do this for sites not hosted on Plesk? Is Plesk doing this through a DNS record, or something else?

add www record.

Well, Yup, you are right about the DNS record thing.

You will need an Cname entry to achieve that.

Here is the URL which contains more information :
http://www.rscott.org/dns/cname.html

You could use an A record as well

The record should look something like this:
www 14400 IN CNAME domain.com.
The TTL (14400) may vary. Also please note the trailing "." after domain.com. Obviously replace "domain.com" with the domain name :)

Huh?
If I am reading the question right you are wanting add an alias file so the web site can be called by www.domain.com or domain.com either one. If I am assuming correctly, all you have to do is add Serveralias www.domain.com domain.com to the VitrualHost directive for that domain.

Monte - That's how I read it at first, however after reading it again, I didn't really see the point in making www go to non-www, since they are most likely going to be the same thing. So I thought kreativ was asking how to add www. Anyway, whatever the question may be I think it is covered in one of the posts here heh ;)

I thought "www.domain.com IN CNAME domain.com" simply allows someone to type in www.domain.com without getting a server not found message. (i.e. it's just an alias for domain.com). How would this convert http://domain.com/page.html to http://www.domain.com/page.html?

Oops, I probably wasn't very clear in my original post. I'm assuming the www CNAME is already present. Otherwise, no one could access the site through www.domain.com.

What I meant was, Plesk has an option in the control panel where if a visitor accesses the site by typing in "http://domain.com/page.html", the URL is automatically changed for them to "http://www.domain.com/page.html"

I'd like to know the most efficient way to do that on a non-Plesk site (Ensim, CPanel, etc.)
Am I making any sense?

Originally posted by kreativ
With Plesk, there is a "www" option which will automatically convert all http://domain.com/ requests to http://www.domain.com/

So http://domain.com/folder/page.html would auto-convert to http://www.domain.com/folder/page.html

How do I do this for sites not hosted on Plesk? Is Plesk doing this through a DNS record, or something else?


As has already been mentioned, you will need either a CNAME or an A record in the DNS for the www for it to resolve, this will not "auto convert" http://domain.com/folder/page.html to http://www.domain.com/folder/page.html though. To get that to happen (if you really need it), you are going to need to rewrite the URL, which , with the apache webserver is done using mod_rewrite. If you have mod_rewrite available in your apache server, you can put lines similar to the following in either the server config file, or in .htaccess files....

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^/(.*) "http://www.mydomain.com/$1" [L,R]

Of course, this needs to be in the appropriate part of the configuration file or file system so that it will be activated by requests to http://mydomain.com....

I guess I am still confused:cartman:

For instance you can address all the sites on my server http://domain.com or http://www.domain com it does not matter. Are you saying you want make it change in the address bar to www. domain.com if they type just domain.com? If so I have no idea and I am backing out of this post, before I make a fool of myself. :D

Originally posted by Monte
I guess I am still confused:cartman:

For instance you can address all the sites on my server http://domain.com or http://www.domain com it does not matter. Are you saying you want make it change in the address bar to www. domain.com if they type just domain.com? If so I have no idea and I am backing out of this post, before I make a fool of myself. :D

Yes, that's what I was trying to get at in my porrly worded post. :) Thanks for the better wording.;)