Hello,
I have what I thought was a fairly straight forward problem but I can’t seem to find an appropriate solution so hopefully someone can help.
We are changing the domain for our site. I don’t want to move any of the files or anything, I simply want to be able to have the site load on newdomain.com and have olddomain.com 301 to it.
Cheers
Peter
It depends upon what control panel you have. Let me guess, you are using cPanel with SSH access. It is for an idea only, to share that it is possible. But not an actual solution.
First, backup everything: entire files, configs, database, …
Register your new domain and point to the same server as your old domain.
Rename(or copy/paste) the old domain’s folder to your new folder.
Recreate your old domain’s public_html, and put the .htaccess to go to new domain.
Make sure that your new domain’s settings are working good. As you change your domain name, file locations, it may stop working.
In other cases, if you do not have such permissions on your server, you can still go with the old FTP way: re-upload the files into your new domain. And, really put an .htaccess forwarder in old domain.
I don’t want to move any of the files or anything
I suppose you could “park” the newdomain over the olddomain, and also have a 301 redirect in your .htaccess files from olddomain.com to newdomain.com. (Parked Domains)
However, if you’re using a CMS (joomla, drupal etc.) there may be settings that you need to take care of such as the site’s URL.
Still, I don’t think this is the cleanest was of doing it. It can’t hurt to talk to your host and see if they can give you some advice on this as well.