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Basically this is a dumb situation where a company creates a cookie-cutter website (I do that for them) for one of their clients. This particular client has their own domain registered on godaddy that they want to display instead of the company's domain they create these sites on.

When I try to simply forward with masking from godaddy, the site will not load. Forwarding without masking of course works.

Does anyone know a way I can make this particular situation work with AWS?

Thank you in advance.

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    Why do you want to forward the domain as opposed to changing the domain of this site? I'd think the solution you would want would be to just us the custom domain name for the site. Aug 31, 2021 at 7:52
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    Can you just use a CNAME dns alias in godaddy?
    – Bergi
    Aug 31, 2021 at 16:36

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Domain "masking" typically involves loading a website from another domain within an iframe (and if I remember correctly, this is how GoDaddy's masking feature works). But if the target website is configured to prevent being loaded within an iframe, then it's not possible to mask it.

Websites can prevent being embedded in an iframe by using the Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors HTTP header directive or the equivalent deprecated X-Frame-Options HTTP header.

So the first thing to check is whether one of these HTTP headers is present on the target domain and is preventing another domain from "masking" it. If so, the only solutions are to (1) get the owner of the domain you are trying to mask to remove the HTTP header from their site, or (2) go with a solution other than masking, which may be the best idea anyways given the drawbacks of domain masking.

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As best I've ever been able to tell thus "url/domain masking" is a made-up term used by a few web providers - They are nothing more then frames or iframes. From a technical POV there is no forwarding going on, and this is considered a bad practice.

You might want to explain what is happening - ie why this masking is not working. It would surprise me there was anything AWS specific causing this to break - but AWS is a bunch of different services, so different things to different people. I suspect that you may not quite understand how all this fits together and postulate you may be conflating technologies and the problem is not to do with masking but rather web server setup.

The "correct" way of performing results similar to masking is to implement some kind if reverse proxying. Typically this is something done at the web server level - so likely not possible to implement in the ideal wayon Godaddy - but I believe this can be emulated easily but inefficiently with PHP.

I've not used any of them but a quick google search for php proxy reveals a number of scripts to do this - eg https://github.com/michaelfranzl/no.php and https://sites.google.com/site/php5class/php-reverse-proxy

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    Reverse proxying can be as simple as utilizing AWS CloudFront - though you should watch your bills :)
    – iBug
    Aug 31, 2021 at 14:40
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    @iBug true - but if you can use cloudfront you can can modify DNS - nullifying the need to use a proxy/domain fronting at all. The challenge I was responding to was how to do it on Godaddy.
    – davidgo
    Aug 31, 2021 at 19:38

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