Sometimes you may wish that a domain registered through Irish Domains redirects visitors to a different website. For example, you might wish that visitors to your domain acmewidgets.ie are instead brought to the website acmewholesalewidgets.com. There are a number of ways to achieve this, depending on the hosting package you already have and exactly how you want the redirection to work.
Note: This article applies only to domains registered and/or hosted on our legacy cp.irishdomains.com system.
URL Redirection:
This is the most common redirection type and allows you to point a domain not only at a different website, but you can point to a specific page on that site. This is great for promotions or for product or country specific domains. It is implemented via a 301 browser redirect, so is compatible with all the major search engines.
To use URL redirection, you must have a subscription from Irish Domains that includes the "Standard Forwarding" service. This is included free with all VPS, shared web hosting, or email only packages. If you do not have such a package, you can purchase a special URL redirection/Email forwarding package that allows you to redirect up to five domain names for a nominal fee.
To configure URL redirection ...
- Log on to your control panel at https://cp.irishdomains.com
- On Home page, under "Domains Section, select "Hosted Domains"
- Select the domain you wish to change by clicking on the domain name
- Click the 'Web' tab, then click 'Change Hosting' (this will remove current website/applications if any)
- If there is no 'Web' tab, click 'Add Hosting' instead.
- Select 'Standard Forwarding' from the drop-down box (if you have more than one subscription, you can select which one is used)
- Click 'Next', then enter the full URL of the page you wish to redirect to (e.g. http://www.acmewidgets.com/somepage.html)
- Click 'Next' and 'Finish'
Please allow 3-5 hours for DNS to propagate and for the redirection to take effect if the domain was not previously set to Parking or
Frame Forwarding:
This is similar to redirection in that the visitor will see content from a different website, but with Frame Forwarding the URL in the visitor's browser will not change. This can be useful in some circumstances, however as this is implemented using a frameset it is not compatible with all websites. More importantly, Frame Forwarding is not suited to search engine optimization and your target content may not be indexed properly.
For this reason we do not recommend the use of this method unless you have a very specific need - use one of the other methods instead.
To configure Frame Forwarding follow the instructions above except you should select "Frame Forwarding" as the hosting type, rather than standard forwarding.
Domain Pointing:
If you know the IP address of the web server that will be hosting the website, you can also point the domain directly at that server via DNS. There is no specific package or service required to do this other than the Free Parking package that is provided with all domains. However, the target web server must be configured correctly to service content for your specific domain, so you should consult the company that runs the web server about the best method to use. You will probably have been given an IP address to be configured (A record) or a hostname to alias to (CNAME record) that can be configured via DNS. For more details, refer to the knowledgebase article below:
