Be Excellent To Each Other

Can anyone shed any light here? Mimi’s site used to be at eskimimimakes.com, and now it’s at mimicodd.com. The eskimimimakes.com domain is on 123-reg and using their control panel this does a 301 redirect to mimicodd.com
Both the url and hosting for mimicodd.com are at ukhost4u

The 301 forwarding we set up seems to have stopped working in the last few days. Very recently, all inbound links appear to be no longer working for any URL other than the root domain.
For example, if I type http://eskimimimakes.com/2009/09/make-y ... ckers.html into an address bar, this should (and used to) forward to http://mimicodd.com/2009/09/make-your-o ... ckers.html, but instead it is now showing a 404 error page on the eskimimimakes.com domain.
If I then manually change the link to have mimicodd.com instead of eskimimimakes.com the URL loads correctly as expected. Typing in eskimimimakes.com correctly redirects to mimicodd.com, and until a few days ago all the longer URLs were working as well.

We think this might be related to a wordpress plugin that has stopped working on mimicodd.com. We don’t know which one was activated but we have Redirection by John Godley which shows a 403 error in the settings page, and SEO Redirection which seems to now be an advert to upgrade to premium to manage 404s.

So here is the question, as 123-reg is doing a 301 redirect at the domain level, is there anything I can do with the htaccess file on mimicodd.com to handle all the folder and longer URLs from eskimimimakes.com? I’m quite happy editing the htaccess file but I’m co fused as to whether this is the correct thing to do in this situation and what rules I’d need.

If you look at the DNS settings in the 123-reg control panel (A, CNAME, TXT records etc) for eskimimimakes.com does it show a CNAME record pointing to mimicodd.com?

No, we used the forwarding page to set up a 301 redirect the other year and until a few days ago it was working fine. Nothing’s changed at 123-the as far as we know and we raised a support ticket with them and they said ‘yeah the forwarding is working, it’s the mapping on your new host that’s the issue’. Have attached the dns page though.

Forwarding page:

A 301 redirect shouldn't require anything at all on the mimicodd.com side. If you request eskimimimakes.com/X then 1-2-3-reg should be sending back the 301 that says 'that's moved, go to mimicodd.com/X instead. I have no idea what mapping they think should be in place on the new host.

So is Bogdan lying to me and 123-reg have broken something? Does my situation make sense if you visit the URLs in the first post? Reply from Bogdan below:

Support Agent
Bogdan
10.8.2018. 07:29

Hi,
Thank you for contacting us regarding this matter.
I have checked your account and from what I could see, the Hosting service for the http://mimicodd.com/ website is at a different provider.
The situation that you mentioned would be in regards to a mapping procedure, that can be done only from the Hosting package.
As eskimimimakes.com is only forwarded to the mimicodd.com domain, the server is trying to retrieve the folders that you're looking for on the Web forwarding server and not the Hosting package.
I'm afraid that because of the above, there is nothing we can do from our end to forward the paths that you want to the folders that you have on your Hosting package.
If there’s anything else at all I can do for you please let me know and I’ll be very happy to help.

Kind Regards,
Bogdan
123-reg

I'm not an expert on this stuff, but just an alternative option if you don't get the forwarding sorted - does your hosting package with ukhost4u include any free parked domains (which seems to be the cPanel term) or aliases (in Plesk)? For example, I just have hosting for consolemad.co.uk, but consolemad.com is added as an alias and so the URLs just work without me giving it any thought. All I needed to do is change the nameservers of both domains to point at the new host.

Run Fiddler or a similar HTTP snooper and load the old website in your browser and see what happens. Either it outputs the 301 correctly and the problem is on the news server, or it doesn’t and the problem is with 123-reg.

I’ve not heard of these. I’ll try and download it and have a look, unless one of you fine gentleman would be able to have a look first if you already have the tool?
I should say that this has been working fine for over a year and only stopped working recently which was what made us first think it was maybe a wordpress plugin on the new domain that had gone wrong or something and where it was previously managing the mapping for us we’d need to do something with the htaccess. I am truly baffled here.

I would remove the forwarding and setup a CNAME record that points to mimicodd.com. 123-reg forwarding has always been shonky imo (seems it hasn't changed much in the 12 years since I worked there).

Chrome's network tab with persistance turned on will do it.

Thanks Grim... I've just installed Fiddler and Mono and worked out the Terminal and it threw an error anyway so I was about to give up hope!
Running the Chrome network tab throws a 404 error straight away as below. Have I took a shot of the right thing here?
Does this throw any light on the situation?

The redirect isn't working, which is nothing to do with the destination website

Ok so is this definitely a 123 reg thing then that I should get back into them about?
They are denying responsibility as eskimimimakes.com DOES redirect to mimicodd.com correctly.

Should a 301 redirect do the subfolders as well, as Cras even said earlier? Is there a link online anywhere I can send to 123-reg to prove that?

A CNAME record would fix your issue here I think.

It'll redirect all subfolders.

Hopefully it won’t have to come to that as it was all working correctly before. If we did have a cname record would that change the url in the address bar to mimicodd.com?

Yep. Just remove the forwarding first.

So what’s the difference between web forwarding and a cname then? Why have two different options for the same thing??

Sorry if I’ve sounded rude or brusque to anyone by the way. Feeling the stress of this one and not sure where to turn.

Adding the CNAME is a DNS record change, whereas web forwarding is often shonky bollocks, poorly implemented.

Open your nat.

Unless I'm mistaken, a DNS forwarder will still show eskimimimakes.com in the URL bar.

I'm pretty sure it won't. But I haven't done one of these in a decade, so I might be wrong!

I believe you are wrong, and the address bar will show the old URL but at least the site will work.

Oh that’s a shame
Having the old URL defeats the point of having the new name.
I’ll keep on at 123-reg to see if something has changed their end then or what they can suggest.

If you get nowhere with them, my suggestion about the parked domain could still be worth exploring.

I've always found that 123-Reg have been fine for domain names but everything else I'd rather do elsewhere.

We’ve just been talking about even moving the whole domain across devilman as you’ll see from 123-reg’s reply:

So why was this working before? Can I ask 123-reg to escalate this to a supervisory level? I’m getting really lost here

Drop me a PM tomorrow Russ, I can help you get this sorted

Thank you SO much. That means a lot