How do I get mydomain.com to resolve to www.mydomain.com with WSS3?

Question

I recently purchased WSS 3.0 hosting from a local provider who set my environment up as www.mydomain.com. For a couple weeks, any requests for the URL mydomain.com would resolve correctly and show the same site as www.mydomain.com. A few days ago, however, I started getting prompted to enter a UID and PWD via Basic Auth for requests to mydomain.com. If I enter a valid UID and PWD, I am taken to a "Not Authorized" error page from SharePoint (not the default one from IIS). If I enter www.mydomain.com into the browser, all works as expected.

I reported this to my host, but they're telling me "we set it up for www, so that's the only URL that will work".

Anyone know how I can fix this issue?

Answer 1

(Your Hosting Company may have to do this, and honestly they should know how...)

In IIS: Right click on your www.mydomain.com and select Edit Bindings. Add a new HTTP binding for mydomain.com to listen to the same IP addresses and Ports as the www binding.

Note! If you use absolute links (http://www.mydomain.com/images/MyLogo.png, for examle) anywhere in the system you will get strange behavior (likely requireing re-authentication) as you inadvertantly browse to the www.mydomain.com site instead of mydomain.com. So, in all of your links and references to site resources use relative URLs (/images/mylogo.png instead of the full www.mydomain etc...)

The other (more SharePoint friendly) method is to set up a second IIS site for mydomain.com and have it redirect the client to www.mydomain.com.

~ED