Be Excellent To Each Other

Can anyone help me confirm if I've done the right thing here?

We have bought some webspace with a hosting company who gave us a .co.uk domain for free. All's good and a site has been set up there. What we want to do now is make eskimimimakes.com go to this new webspace.

So yes, there's a .co.uk domain already there, but we want it to be so that the .com domain takes all precedence and smoothly operates from this new hosting.

I asked the host, and they said that the name servers needed updating with the domain company (123reg). I logged in to the 123reg panel and changed some bits and now have the following:

I also clicked the link that said "To create nameservers based on your domain (eskimimimakes.com), click here" and filled in both the nameservers and the IP addresses that they pointed to. I would put a screenshot of that, but the fields have been erased, which makes me think that adding those settings wasn't successful.

So, now I can only assume that everything's ok, and eskimimimakes.com will stop pointing at bloodspot (the old hosting) and will start pointing at the new hosting as soon as the name changes propogate all over the net.

HERE'S THE KICKER:
On some devices here we can still browse the old site on the old web space. On others it says that the domain cannot be found. I did a WHOIS thing and it showed two different name servers:

So am I just being impatient? If so, why would the old site stop working before the new one started up again?

wait 2 days before panicking.

It will be the longest 2 days ever.

I would imagine the new site isn't working, but the old one is.

At no point during those two days should the domain fail to resolve, though.

Oh, missed the new one not working bit. That's not right and eventually will all be broken. sorry for my confusion.

Ok, so how can I make them all not broken?

I want the eskimimimakes.com to point at the new hosting space which is up and running fine (as I can see it on the .co.uk domain).

I expected that eskimimimakes.com would go blogspot, blogspot, blogspot new hosting, not blogspot, nothing, nothing, nothing.

This bit strikes me as wrong. All you do at 123-reg is change the nameservers - don't do anything with IP addresses.

Then you'll have to log into your ukhost4u control panel and change the DNS so that eskimimimakes.com resolves to the correct IP. You might also have to change some other setting somewhere to tell it that anything from eskimimimakes.com should point to a certain folder, but it's been so long since I've used a shared server I don't really remember how they work.

Oh wait, you've already got a domain that works, let's make this simpler.

Go to 123-reg, choose the eskimimimakes.com domain, and reset its Nameservers (go back to the "change nameservers" page and click the "go back to 123-reg default" button).

Now go back to the "manage domain" page, choose "manage DNS", click on the "Advanced DNS" tab, and add a CNAME pointing at the .co.uk domain, like so:



That should be it. You might still get some downtime, though, as the old settings propagate out.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you use address@eskimimimakes.com then it's going to stop working if you do the above. Actually, it's going to stop working either way, unless you set it up again on the UKHosts4U site.

Thank you, that's not going to be a perfect solution though, as Mimi doesn't want the .co.uk domain to be present on the new or anything. It only exists because they gave us a free one.

The way it should work is as if the .co.uk domain never existed.

Do I have to do something with ukhost4u to tell them that eskimimimakes.com is the one that the hosting should be represented by?

Cname is an invisible forwarder. Unless the end user is trying to dig the site or something, they'll be looking at a url that says something like "http://eskimimimakes.com/2013/10/wip-not-a-fox.html".

Also, if you haven't already guessed - next time if it ain't broke, don't fix it

Heh, but ukhost4u said we needed to change the nameservers!

Wait - who used to host it?

Blogspot. We had a load of a records and things set as per the blogger instructions.

Thanks for your help, Grim...

Unfortunately it was broken before. People couldn't access the site because of something to do with the way that blogger handles the custom domain meaning that some people (including anyone at my work) couldn't access it because of the re-directs, plus Blogger is quite restrictive and there are things that I want to do that only Wordpress will allow me to do, so I had to move it from blogger hosted to self-hosted wordpress to be able to do that.

Basically, moving from hosted on blogger (but having the eskimimimakes.com address pointing at it) to hosted on my own webspace at http://www.eskimimimakes.com.

I don't know why the other (.co.uk) address was involved. I didn't realise that they were going to set that up to have anything to do with it, so that was an un-needed headache.

I thought it would be a case of stopping the .com address from pointing at blogger. Setting the .com address up to point at the new webspace. Uploading the wordpress install to that new space and then importing the content, but some extra 'bits' seem to have happened.

I think we have sorted it using some domain parking shizzle.

I've got 123-reg domains hosted on ukhost4u. When I'm more awake I'll take some piccies.

Mostly as I remember it it is set the 123-reg domain nameservers to the ukhost4u ones then in the ukhost4u panel there's an 'additional domains' section where you add the domain name, set up the a and MX and the folder in your main account that it points at.

So... should there be something at eskimimimakes.com or .co.uk?

Cos I get an error.

I did the "change nameservers (dns)" jig at 123-reg, setting ns48.ukhost4u.com, ns47.ukhost4u.com - annoyingly now I've done that, it looks like 123-reg won't show me what they are anywhere so I just had to WHOIS the domain.

That's the "wait two days" bit, but as pointed out that I missed if the next stuff is done then visitors should get old or new, not broken. So you've fallen down somewhere in here:

At the cPanel for my ukhost4u account's main domain
Fill in the details
End up with this
Rather than jumping straight to fully functioning CMS site, upload a simple index.html to prove the DNS and ukhost4u lookup is working.
I use Google Apps so I had to set up the MX Entry for each domain so mail goes there instead of ukhost4uI did simple DNS mods so I get my nice redirects to google mail, docs and that.If you want I can take photos of those.


I don't use it but WordPress is an auto-install thing, you probably shouldn't just upload a random copy of the software, but maybe you have to get it working

And I'm spent.

Yes, always remember if you change away from the 123-reg nameservers, that anything in its DNS section will be utter junk.

Yeah, it shows me all the old stuff in the dns editor which confused me for a minute but the "change nameservers (dns)" page just has blank boxes instead of what it really is, probably the "disappeared/unsuccessful" comment Russell made - don't worry, don't click that other link, just tap in the ukhost4u ones and click DOITNOWDOIT or whatever it's called.

And whois.domaintools.com shows ns9. and ns10.ukhost4u for both domains, so that's propagating away nicely.

Edit: And eskimimimakes.co.uk redirects to the .com, which works. I should've checked that before taking all those screenshots. Oh well.

They should both go through to eskimimimakes.com

Yes they do.

Hehe, no, it's really handy to check on what we've done.

Essentially, what nobody at either the host or domain services side told us what that yes, though we had changed the name servers they still needed to be attached to the webspace in some kind of reciprocal gesture.

Where I originally wanted to set up the new space with .com attached it was instead set up with the .co.uk free address attached. Though the nameservers had been successfully edited it was only recognising that .co.uk was associated with the space. To change the main attached domain to .com would have been an extra pocket of money so we parked the .com and forwarded the .co.uk traffic to .com, as you said.

Hopefully all is working now on that basic level. Now to sort out the permalink structures.

Indeed they now do here, too.

It was perhaps still propagating before, so maybe was wonky for a while, though I have just had someone on my Facebook page say that they can't access it, so I will keep an eye out.

Thanks for letting me know, folks, and to everyone, especially Bik, for all of the detailed help.

It shouldn't ever have not worked which was the weird thing.

Instead of redirecting i think you could set the document root of both domains to the same folder but then there's extra work in always making sure any internal paths/urls are relative instead of cross-domain.

Hm, is the .com the main domain now or is the .co.uk the main account one? If ukhost4u swapped it that might explain it. An arse of a concept to get across so ignore me and be happy it works again!

Um. Now I think about it, I have a five domain package that I use for email to one domain, and I just set 3 domains to expire.

you could have had one of those slots. Doh.

Still, I'll probably cut it to 1 domain when the 3 year deal ends anyway.

The 'main' domain according to ukhost4u is the .co.uk one. This is my fault because they offered a domain for free when buying the space and I did that rather than only use the .com one and transfer it later.

The main one should be .com but ukhost4u want to charge a tenner plus vat to make .com the main domain.

Instead we've parked the .com domain on the .co.uk domain and it seems to make it as though the .com one is main after an internal redirect. If the .co.uk version had never existed this would have all been a lot easier to work out, but I'm a dick.

They explain their offers poorly. I thought I was getting 3 years for cheap AND a free .co.uk. It was only when they threatened to turn it all off if I didn't pay for the latter it became clear it was one or the other not both.

£12 to switch it around though - that's just cunty.

This thread reminded me that I have one domain and some space hosted by UKHost4U, so I went along to shift everything to my current server.

My user ID is 125. I fear I may have been there for some time

[edit]Registered on: 19-Aug-2005
Gawsh.

The good news is that everything seems to be up and running as it should now. A few people contacted me yesterday to say that they couldn't connect, were getting errors or spurious pages that weren't part of my website, but when I woke up this morning those same people had all updated me on facebook to say that it was now working as it should, so yay.