Redirect example.com to www.example.com VPS & Apache2

Question

I have a VPS and a domain name registered with the provider.

When I enter www.example.com my site is displayed correctly, but entering example.com does not work. I am able to ping www.example.com.

I added the following line to my apache2 default vhosts file:

ServerName example.com
ServerAlias www.example.com

But this did not work.

The VPS is a Debian5 OS.

Any ideas? Note: There is no option via a provided control panel to add this, it's a basic package I purchased

I know this post answers it but there are no extra comments and I'd like to know if it's the best way:
way to redirect page to www using virtual host configuration in sites-available for apache2?

Thanks

Answer 1

To get DNS resolution to work, you need to have an A record for 'example.com', not just 'www.example.com'. Once that's there, what you've done so far will probably work. This sounds like an DNS issue so far.

Answer 2

To answer the second part of your question. The answer you link to is indeed a good example of doing the redirect. The first RewriteCond may not be required if you're not using SSL, but it should not do any harm.