CNAME redirect

  • Unknown's avatar
    kd2big · Member ·

    I have a CNAME record on my DNS server set up to redirect http://www.alehman.com to to this site alehmanprof.wordpress.com. It looks like wordpress.com is redirecting back to the root of alehman.com. Is there anything I can do about that?

    WP.com: Yes
    Correct account: Yes

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    I’m afraid I don’t understand what you’re trying to do here. Can you provide some more detail on what you want the end result to be?

    I can tell you we’re not redirecting anything, as we have absolutely no control over your domain or any of its subdomains.

    A CNAME and a redirect are two completely different things, used for different purposes.

    A redirect is used to send traffic from one domain, to a completely different domain. If you want people trying to reach www.alehman.com to end up on your WordPress.com site instead, you need to set up a 301 redirect at your current hosting provider for that domain.

    A CNAME is a DNS record used to create a subdomain on a domain, and point that subdomain to a particular server via an alias, which is another domain. But a CNAME doesn’t redirect traffic, and pointing a subdomain via CNAME will only work if the subdomain is also properly mapped to the server on the other end. Here on WordPress.com, that mapping requires our Domain Connection upgrade, which is included in all our paid plans. Without that upgrade, pointing any subdomain to us via CNAME will only take you to an error page.

    However, it’s also not possible to map the www subdomain of any domain to a site on WordPress.com. That is most likely why you’re ending up again at the root instead of at a WordPress.com error page.

    It is also not recommended to point your domain’s root and www subdomain to different servers, so if you can tell me more about the end result you want here, I might be able to give you better advice on what you need to do in this case.

  • Unknown's avatar
    kd2big · Member ·

    Sorry for adding confusion by using the word “redirect”.

    I have a CNAME listing in my DNS which replies with the address alehmanprof.wordpress.com when somebody tries to access my http://www.alehman.com domain. That’s all the CNAME name listing does.

    The client machine should then dutifully go along and make a second DNS query to find an address for alehmanprof.wordpress.com.

    This is what is not working. The client machine does this, and then when trying to access the alehmanprof.wordpress.com site the wordpress server is responding telling the web browser to redirect to http://alehman.com. This is what I’m trying to stop.

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Can you tell me what your end goal is? I don’t understand what you’re trying to achieve by pointing the www subdomain to a WordPress.com site.

    As I explained above, this is because we don’t allow mapping of www subdomains to WordPress.com, and there is also no domain connection upgrade on our end that maps the subdomain to the WordPress.com site.

    So what you’re trying to do isn’t possible with a WordPress.com site. If you can tell me what the end goal is, I might be able to point you to an alternative option that will work.

  • Unknown's avatar
    kd2big · Member ·

    I primarily use my alehman.com domain for email. But I wanted to be able to send the occasional users who tried to hit http://www.alehman.com domain with their browser to a static page on wordpress.

    I thought I might be able to get this to work because I’m not asking WordPress to alias anything, I’m doing it myself, with my DNS. So I set up a CNAME record to alias http://www.alehman.com to alehmanprof.wordpress.com.

    This should work, but it looks like WordPress is actively disallowing this.

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    But I wanted to be able to send the occasional users who tried to hit http://www.alehman.com domain with their browser to a static page on wordpress.

    The only way to do that is via a 301 redirect, that sends traffic from your subdomain to the WordPress.com address instead.

    Using a CNAME will only work if you also add the domain connection upgrade on our end to map the subdomain to the site, and that’s not possible for a www subdomain on WordPress.com.

  • Unknown's avatar
    kd2big · Member ·

    Yeah, that’s what I’ve figured was the case. Thanks very much for your help kokkieh.

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