Question

I am dealing with some client’s that use Windows servers and as such do not support .htaccess files. This is not a huge deal but, my concern is this:

I have a rule set up in my .htaccess file to redirect the non-www version of the site to the www version. This makes the URL’s look nicer and prevents duplicate content being indexed.

However, there does not seem to be a simple way to do this on a Windows server. I have read through tutorials on setting up a web.config file but, my Windows server experience is very limited and many times I only have FTP access to the site (no server access).

Any ideas on a quick and fairly simple solution, that I could use?

Answer 1

Create web.config (in the root directory) file with the next content:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
     <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true" />
        <rewrite>
            <rules>
                <rule name="CanonicalHostNameRule" stopProcessing="true">
                    <match url="(.*)" />
                    <conditions>
                        <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^www\.domain\.com$" negate="true" />
                    </conditions>
                    <action type="Redirect" url="http://www.domain.com/{R:1}" />
                </rule>
            </rules>
        </rewrite>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

The URL Rewrite Module (at least version 2.0) has to be installed.