no-www redirect not working / DNS A record

Question

I'm far from an expert on this, but I'll try to be as clear as possible.

I have an eshop solution leased from a company and it's hosted on their server. I can access it thru company.com/myshop and it also allows me to set up to 3 domains that they should recognize and redirect to my specific shop from.

I registered a domain with a different company and am trying to "redirect" it to the eshop. By means of one of the following DNS entries (as they look in the admin GUI)

• * A 111.111.111.111
• *.myshop.com A 111.111.111.111
• myshop.com A 111.111.111.111

I've managed to make www.myshop.com redirect to the IP of company.com (111.111.111.111), which then goes on to do exactly what I expect it to do (ie. recognizes it comes from my domain, does some further redirects itself). However, I can't seem to make myshop.com (ie. without the www) redirect to that IP, too.

The company that I registered the domain with provides a "URL redirect" service, but google would only register the redirect request and wouldn't follow it. That's why I hope for a DNS solution to this - my assumption being I've managed to miss adding a record to the DNS; if, however, the reason lies elsewhere, I'd be happy to hear about that too. If it's a search engine friendly solution (ie the www/no-www dilemma - avoidance of double content penalties), then that's even better; have no prefference either way (www/no-www), just need it to work.

Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks

Answer 1

Per your response to LazyOne and paulmorriss, I can only assume that you have an incorrect DNS configuration. We can automatically rule out that it ever gets redirected to eshop just because it shows, per your description, leads to the domain company.

No where in and DNS entries that I have edited have I seen a wildcard entry (*) like you have above for your records. As anything (*) is automatically forwarded to your @ entry, in this case: company.com. Now I don't know for sure if this can affect anything, but let's go ahead and get rid of it shall we.

Now your main DNS entry, the A (Host) entry should be looking like this:

@            A            111.111.111.111

But your www record should be a CNAME (Alias) record, as it is an alias for your main domain; Thus looking like this:

www          CNAME        company.com

Now for the catch: Once the redirect is passed on, who knows what eshop's server configuration will do to the domain. It might become truncated to only show company.com or it might just stay as is, www.company.com. I can only assume that's out of your control.

Something a bit more specific to your situation: As you have posted, only 3 domains will be recognized by eshop. Is this why you choose a wildcard as one. By definition, a wildcard cannot become an alias itself. However, if you say that you can access eshop via company.com/myshop, then either the site is being hosted on your host (or you've done something extra that your not telling us... etc.), OR they can configure it to act that way. And if that's the case, then you'll never know what's working or not since they seem to be in control of things.