Site not accessible without www in url - Error 400 bad request

Question

A site that I am developing works with the format www.domain.com but when typing the domain without the www i.e domain.com I receive a error 400 bad request. How can I enable non-www for my site.

Answer 1

To solve your problem, if you're using Apache, you can use mod_rewrite in this way:

• Create a text file and call it .htaccess
• Open the file with a text editor and write:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^juve-news\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.juve-news.com/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

• Save the file and upload it in your website root folder

Answer 2

First check the DNS records for your domain. You need to have an A Record for both the www. and non-www. versions of the domain. Some providers will use an @ for the non-www. version.

Then check your server's host.conf file. This is where (in Apache at least) you tell your webserver where to direct traffic for various domains. If you have a directive for www.domain.com but not domain.com that can cause requests to fail, as your server doesn't know where to send them.

Answer 3

If you're using Apache, you can configure it in your control panel to always use the "www" prefix or make it to remove the "www" prefix, go to domain management and change the 'A" record to always use "www" prefix.normally this shouldn't even be a problem, because most web hosting has this already configured.