Hi. I am very new at this - I've previously been using canned software to build my site, and I want to try to expand into more direct construction. I have two sites with hostmysite. I want to redirect one toward the other. From what I've been able to understand (if I do understand!) a "301 redirect" is the best way to do this, using a file called .htacess at the root level of my directories (I have a linux-based account.) However, I don't see this file there, even when I show invisible files in my FTP client, nor is it in my htdocs folder.

How do I create this file, if I can, and what would be the proper syntax for the 301 redirect? (Or, what wrong assumptions am I making?)

thanks. I appreciate your help.

An htaccess file is a simple ASCII file, such as you would create through a text editor like NotePad or SimpleText.

In order to create the file, open up a text editor and save an empty page as .htaccess (or type in one character, as some editors will not let you save an empty page). Chances are that your editor will append its default file extension to the name (ex: for Notepad it would call the file .htaccess.txt). You need to remove the .txt (or other) file extension. You can do this by right clicking on the file and renaming it by removing anything that doesn't say .htaccess. You can also rename it via telnet or your ftp program, and you should be familiar enough with one of those so as not to need explaining.

htaccess files must be uploaded as ASCII mode, not BINARY. You may need to CHMOD the htaccess file to 644 or (RW-R--R--). This makes the file usable by the server, but prevents it from being read by a browser, which can seriously compromise your security. (For example, if you have password protected directories, if a browser can read the htaccess file, then they can get the location of the authentication file and then reverse engineer the list to get full access to any portion that you previously had protected. There are different ways to prevent this, one being to place all your authentication files above the root directory so that they are not www accessible, and the other is through an htaccess series of commands that prevents itself from being accessed by a browser.

Most commands in htaccess are meant to be placed on one line only, so if you use a text editor that uses word-wrap, make sure it is disabled or it might throw in a few characters that annoy Apache to no end, although Apache is typically very forgiving of malformed content in an htaccess file.

htaccess files affect the directory they are placed in and all sub-directories, that is an htaccess file located in your root directory (yoursite.com) would affect yoursite.com/content, yoursite.com/content/contents, etc. It is important to note that this can be prevented (if, for example, you did not want certain htaccess commands to affect a specific directory) by placing a new htaccess file within the directory you don't want affected with certain changes, and removing the specific command(s) from the new htaccess file that you do not want affecting this directory. In short, the nearest htaccess file to the current directory is treated as the htaccess file. If the nearest htaccess file is your global htaccess located in your root, then it affects every single directory in your entire site.

Before you go off and plant htaccess everywhere, make sure you don't do anything redundant, since it is possible to cause an infinite loop of redirects or errors if you place something weird in the htaccess.

As for configuring .htaccess for 301 redirects (I should mention we don't technically support redirects) you can build on the following example of redirecting all requests to domain.com to www.domain.com which can be modified to redirect based on subdomain, etc.:

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all requests coming in to domain.com will get redirected to www.domain.com
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Please REPLACE domain.com and www.newdomain.com with your actual domain name.

Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled. This is not enabled by default, so you may need to contact us in support to enable it.

You could also use a simplr php redirect page using this code:

<?
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com" );
?>