Domain without the 'www.' gives me the Apache 'It works!' page

Question

When I enter in my domain like this

www.domain.com

everything works fine. But when I enter it like this

domain.com

I get the 'It works!' page. I'm a complete Apache newb so I'm not exactly sure whats going wrong here.

Answer 1

Traditional solution: in the httpd configuration, find:

ServerName www.domain.com

and add:

ServerAlias domain.com

However, this will give you a server that responds with the same content on domain.com and www.domain.com. It's generally considered preferable (particularly SEO-wise) to have only one canonical hostname. To do that, add a new virtual server for the redirect, instead of the alias.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName domain.com
    Redirect permanent / http://www.domain.com/
</VirtualHost>

Answer 2

This has to do with the Apache config as others have stated.

Simply added a ServerAlias to the apache config for your virtualhost will do it for you. I don't think that it is good practice to create another virtualhost have it redirect for you.

It is good SEO practice to direct everything to one or the other, I suggest using this in either you config file or in your .htaccess

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Answer 3

I had this problem too, and found my solution here.

Basically, after an upgrade, Apache put a symlink in /etc/apache2/sites-available. Deleting everything between and including <VirtualHost *:80> and <VirtualHost> got everything working for me again.

Answer 4

Check the mod_alias at your apache config file, make sure that the regex is correct for redirection.