.htaccess - How do I redirect a subdomain to a different domain?

Question

How do I redirect this:

www.sub.example.com

to this:

www.example2.com

How is this done -- 301? .htaccess? Can someone point me in the right direction please? My host is NearlyFreeSpeech and the domain I want to redirect to is quite a large site with a static IP.

Answer 1

There are multiple ways to do this:

• If you have control of the domain, you can use a CNAME record provided by your DNS server.
• In Apache, you can specify a Redirect or RedirectPermanent directive in your Apache configuration files (httpd.conf, .htaccess, etc.)
• In Apache, you can specify a reverse proxy via the ProxyPass directive. Here's some documentation detailing this solution.

Other solutions are possible, and generally vary by server and configuration stack. I assume Apache compliance, given the presence of .htaccess in the problem statement.

Here's a Wikipedia reference on redirects via the 3xx family of HTTP status codes, if anyone's curious about the client's perspective.

Answer 2

Something like this should do it

RedirectPermanent / http://www.example2.com

RedirectPermanent would return a 301 code and force the client to go to www.example2.com, it works in apache config file and .htaccess file. You need mod_alias enabled to use it.

You can use this on the root directory of the subdomain in a .htaccess file, or in the virtualhost section of your apache configuration file.

For your reference the documentation