Question

I have a site hosted at Network Solutions, along with two domains. “OldDomain” used to point to hosting account, but now “NewDomain” points to host.

PROBLEM: Redirecting “OldDomain” doesn’t work without creating redirect loops.

I’ve tried the following:

1) Redirecting OldDomain (with/out “www”), plus redirect non-www for NewDomain:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.com$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^newdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,NC]

2) Redirect using PHP header:

$dom = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
if(strripos($dom, 'olddomain.com') >= 0) {
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); 
header("Location: http://www.newdomain.com/");
}

Option #1 doesn’t do anything. Option #2 puts me in a redirect loop even with the first two RewriteCond rules commented out.

I’ve done many .htaccess redirects before, but this one is giving me a headache as to why it’s not acting right. Is this just a Network Solutions issue? I’ve never had problems with any other hosts. By the way, NS support tells me I have to pay to forward OldDomain to NewDomain because it’s currently not pointing to a hosting package. If that’s the case, why can’t I point both domains to the same hosting package and at least use the PHP redirect in the header of the index page??

THANKS for any help on this!

Answer 1

Option 1 doesn’t do anything because you have this logic in your conditions

• Host is www.olddomain.com
• OR host is olddomain.com
• AND host is newdomain.com

Obviously, the host can’t both be newdomain.com and either one of the old domains. Try adding an additional [OR] to that and some [NC], too:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com$ [OR,NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.com$ [OR,NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^newdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,NC]

Option 2, you have this to see if the host contains olddomain.com:

if(strripos($dom, 'olddomain.com') >= 0) {

Problem here is strripos() returns FALSE (which is also a 0) if string isn’t found, which means if $dom was www.newdomain.com, it would return FALSE, or 0, and the >= 0 would be true, thus redirecting again. You need to do something like this:

if(strlen(strstr($dom, 'olddomain.com')) > 0) {