A family friend had a wordpress.com site for which he purchased a .com domain name from wordpress.com last August. I talked him into switching to a self-hosted site last September because the site had real potential. I helped him set up the new site with a hosting provider, and pointed the .com domain name to his hosting account.
Fast forward to this year - the .com domain is due to expire in one week and can be renewed at a cost of $34. To save money, he bought the .ca version of the domain name from his hosting provider for $10, and he wants to let the .com domain name expire. The new domain name is now pointing to the website.
My question: what is the best strategy to deal with redirecting users from the old domain to the new domain in terms of redirecting old users to the new domain name?
I’m not sure you can. Once the .com expires, you presumably get no say in where it’s directed. I think you’re effectively starting from scratch to market and promote the new domain. Is it worth losing what’s been built up so far for the sake of a $24 saving?
The problem is that the website owner is a student, and every dollar saved is crucial - even $24. I don’t mind buying the .com for him from his hosting provider after a suitable waiting period, instead of from wordpress.com, but in the meantime I guess I will just let things go. He doesn’t care about search engine ranking, etc. This is just a matter of being considerate to his past users.
I found dealing with the wordpress.com domain name last year when I had to point it to the new hosting account was a major pain.
There are domain registrars who will renew a .com domain for you at around $10 - so why did you leave it with one that is charging almost 3-1/2 times as much? Not sure if you can actually change registrar with less than a week to go - there is a 60 day period after changing registrar in which you can’t change registrar again and you can’t change after the domain expires but I’m not sure if there is a period immediately prior to expiry when they lock you in.
Not me. This actually is my daughter’s boyfriend who made the decision to buy the domain name from wordpress.com on his own. I would never have recommended this, and now I am trying to get him set up with something that is less expensive and makes more sense in the long run.
This is his site, and normally I am not involved in his decisions or the cost of his purchases for the site.
This came up when he let his hosting lapse by accident and he asked me to help him out. I then discovered that the domain name he was using was due to expire without him being award of it, and that it was going to cost a lot to renew it.
At this point, the .com domain cannot be transferred.
Chrisofarabia is right. “.COM” domain is the best for any business, your friend should not have to switch. Suggest him the value of a perfect domain for a business. But if he has done with it, then you can easily redirect the url by updating .htaccess file for 301 redirect.
Hope this link will help him to get this done- http://www.wikihow.com/Redirect-a-URL
You can only set the .htaccess file for the old domain (in this case, the .com) to redirect to the new (in this case, the .ca). The redirect will only work for the next few days, until the .com domain expires.
I think at this point the best that can be done is
put up a type of “we’re moving” message on the com site
if the site has users subscribed to a “newsletter” include the information in that.
I would advise to not send out emails to every email address you may have if they have not opted-in to getting emails. It might be that only the com domain would be at risk of getting blacklisted as an email spam site, but I don’t know if some blacklisting ignores the TLD in which case the ca domain would be in trouble too.
Other than that, it will take time for users to search and find the new site.
Thank you for your responses. I think for the sake of just one week, I will suggest he just inform the users he knows about the domain change and sometime in the future, when the .com domain becomes available again, he can register it as a secondary domain for the site. This is a sports article site which is still in its infancy and not much will be lost, even though it has shown great potential.