Redirect all traffic from http://example.com to http://www.example.com at the DNS level

Question

I'm using Amazon Web Services to host my site and since I am going to use the ELB service I will need to redirect all my traffic from http://example.com to http://www.example.com.

Is this possible through the DNS?

I am using Route 53 as my DNS. Any hints would be appreciated.

Answer 1

You cannot do redirects in DNS.

Instead, you need an HTTP server that sends HTTP 301 redirects in response to requests for mysite.com.
Most registrars offer redirect servers; consult yours.

Answer 2

To supplement SLaks response, a common way to handle this is to use mod_rewrite in Apache and send a 301 redirect. In other words, let ELB send the traffic to an Apache server running on your EC2 instance. Then have Apache send a redirect if the hostname does not include www.

Here's a sample snippet:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http:/www.example.com/$1 [R,L]

Hope that helps.