Force www to always show in address bar? [duplicate]

Question

This question already has an answer here:

• redirect non-www to www while preserving protocol 1 answer

I have created a website for a client (my first freelance job!) and my client is generally happy, however they want the address bar to always show the www. portion, even if it isn't typed.

Is this possible? I have purchased the domain through 123-reg and am hosting the website on Azure (as an Azure Website). I am guessing I need to add an A record to the DNS settings, would this be correct? Or is it a setting I need to change on Azure? Or something on the web.config file?

The site has been created with ASP.Net MVC4.

Thanks

Answer 1

Redirect non-www to www in MCV4

Edit global.asax and add:

protected void Application_BeginRequest (object sender, EventArgs e)
{
   if (!Request.Url.Host.StartsWith ("www") && !Request.Url.IsLoopback)
   {
      UriBuilder builder = new UriBuilder (Request.Url);
      builder.Host = "www." + Request.Url.Host;
      Response.StatusCode = 301;
      Response.AddHeader ("Location", builder.ToString ());
      Response.End ();
   }
}

Answer 2

If you cannot change your Apache configuration, you can try http://wwwizer.com (top of the page) where you point the NAKED domain to the IP address of WWWizer, and your WWW subdomain to your server. This will redirect all requests to the WWW subdomain.

Answer 3

Yes, you can redirect urls without the www to then include them. How to do so depends on your host. Some hosts have an option for this and you can just press a button to make it happen.

Most host serve both www and no-www sites from the same directory on an Apache server. In this case you will need to use rewrite rules to do it.

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