Odd problem?

[Bud]

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Hopefully someone can enlighten me as to why I'm having an odd little problem.

One of my domains seems to be failing in it's url direction:

ie. when 'www.domainame.com/contact.html' is entered as the address it works fine but when the wwws are dropped and 'domainame.com/contact.html' is used it fails, displaying "Sorry! We could not find www.domainname.comcontact.html" - it loses the slash seperator somehow.

Does anyone know what's going on and how I can correct this?

Thanks

[accelerator]

What about if you just enter:

domainname.com

in the address bar, i.e. without the www.

If that does not work, then you will need to contact your web hosting company as they need to adjust your DNS so that your domain will also resolve without the www.

Rgds

[Bud]

Thanks for your reply.

domainname.com ... in the address bar, i.e. without the www.

That works fine, resolves correctly. Got me confused!

[Stavros]

This sounds like something that may be caused by an error in your .htaccess file? Are you using .htaccess files?

[Bud]

Spot on Stavros!

Just been talking to the host and that's what they said the problem was - .htaccess

Not sure what the actual problem was with it, but they've sorted it for me and all's well now.

Addition:
Just been having a look and it appears I had some 'rogue' coding in the .htaccess file and the host appears to have, well, basically deleted everything in it! Works OK, so I'm happy. No idea where the 'rogue' stuff came from as I don't intentionally use .htaccess files normally.

[Paul Smith]

RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymLinks
# Redirect non-www to www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Replace domain.com and put that into your .htaccess. That will redirect all non www. requests to their corresponding www. page.

Worth a try at the very least.


EDIT: Nevemind, beat me to the reponse

[Bud]

No - that was worthwhile - I think

Maybe I read it wrong... that's very similar to what I thought was the old file but it may be the new one! (just it's called .htaccess-bak) - I presumed this was a backup of the old one.

Can you guess this isn't my strong point!

[Bud]

Right - I think I understand this now!

I've just been looking at the file dates and this appears to be the situation:

Old file (which didn't work) was renamed as .htaccess-bak and contained:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomainname.co.uk$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "http\:\/\/www\.mydomainname\.co\.uk$1" [R=301,L]

Host corrected this by creating a new .htaccess - which is empty.

I can only presume that the previous .htaccess code was incorrect, but once again - no idea where that came from!

It now works - I'm happy

[Paul Smith]

Good to see you have it sorted and nice to see such a proactive host working on a Saturday night, who do you use out of interest?

[Bud]

Host is Eukhost.

Although they do (did?) have some problems and others have had issues with them, I can't fault that kind of 24hr online support. Great for sorting these little niggles out.