Use same hosting and same website for a new domain I purchased without redirecting to it

Question

I have a somedomainname.in domain with hosting from some ABC provider. The site is up and running.

I recently bought its .com i.e somedomainname.com from a seller on GoDaddy, I want to use the same hosting that is already present for my .in.

I do not want to host a seperate site using this hosting, I want to point to the same site.

i.e

say I have a post on somedomainname.in/hello-world and if somebody hits somedomainname.com/hello-world it should show the same page without changing/redirecting to the .in url

I read about pointing name-servers of my .com to the .in and then somehow using the folder where the file resides.

I want my .com to be my primary site which I will be sharing with everyone, posting on facebook/twitter etc but behind the scenes it will actually be using the .in domain's hosting.

Can someone please adivce me on this ?

Answer 1

You want to update your DNS settings for the .com domain. The domain registrar usually has tools to make this easier. You can set a CNAME record (alias) like this:

somedomain.com. CNAME somedomain.in.

This will cause somedomain.com to resolve to the same IP address as somedomian.in, and display the same content.

Some hosting providers have name-based virtual hosting which means that many domains can point to a single IP and display customized content. If that is the case, make sure your somedomain.in server is set to recognize that both somedomain.in and somedomain.com should point to your content.

Answer 2

If you were to use a CNAME then essentially the somedomain.in and the somedomain.com websites would appear to run in parallel with duplicate content - and this can poorly impact your search engine page ranking.

So while the CNAME solution more closely matches what you asked for in your request and requires less effort/changes, it is not ideal for the long term if you wish to use the .com as your primary domain moving forward. At some point you should be looking to move your website and email hosting to be setup under your new .com domain.

This may simply be a configuration change that your hosting provider is happy to accommodate for you, though depending on the provider they may require you to create a new hosting account, move the website and email mailboxes across yourself using a backup and restore method, and then cancel the original hosting account. Either way, you should end up paying the same at the end of it.

1. For the somedomain.com domain setup DNS A records for www and @ pointing to the IP address of the web server your current website is hosted at - these will direct website visitors, and MX records to appropriate mailserver.

2. For the somedomain.in domain use an HTTP 301 Redirect to point people to your new website domain, an setup email aliases to redirect inbound email messages to your new @somedomain.com mailboxes.