Rebranding: how do I redirect my website to a new domain, and blog to a subdomain?

Question

I have a website that I am rebranding and using a new domain name for. Right now it is primarily a blog hosted at the root.

I am going to be redirecting from www.old.com to www.new.com, and I also want to move my blog to blog.new.com. Currently www.old.com doesn't serve any subdomains.

Based on the research I've done, it would seem that I need to use 301 redirects because these should be permanent. I just don't really know what I need to do to setup these redirects. Should I use mod_rewrite?

My sites are hosted on Dreamhost so any Apache configuration that I would need to do I believe I'd have to do in an .htaccess file.

Answer 1

All of the following code will be placed in a file called .htaccess in your root web directory and mod_rewrite enabled on your server.

Changing the domain is easy to do. The following snippet should do it:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?old\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.new.com/$1 [R=301,L]

To move your blog you can use the following snippet (assuming your blog is in a subdiretory called /blog):

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^blog\.old\.com$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^blog/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://blog.new.com/$1 [L,QSA]