Web Hosting News

URL Redirection Service Enabled In Customers' Web Hosting Control Panel
19.11.2008

New service has been introduced into the customers' Web Hosting Control Panel - URL Redirection. Customers are able now to set up redirection of any desired URL hosted on our servers to another URL - hosted on ours or on a remote server. The setup is performed from the newly established URL Protect & Redirect section in the Web Hosting Control Panel (former 'Password Protected Areas' section) and is easy to manage by beginners and advanced users.

There are two types of redirection service to choose from: regular - 'Redirect Directive', and defined - 'RedirectMatch Directive'. The first option is recommended for all type of users as it sets a redirection of the whole content of a hosted web folder (URL) to another URL. The second redirection is for more technically advanced users and is based on matching defined criteria (regular expressions) and sending the corresponding items from a selected web folder to a new URL. More detailed explanation about the two services follows below:

The section has user-friendly interface that is easy to operate and is provided with context help tooltips:

Redirect Directive - When customers select this option in the 'Choose Redirect method' field, they need to select in the dropdown below the domain/sub domain where the URL to redirect is hosted and then specify the full name of the web folder (URL) path. Next step is selecting an HTTP status code for the redirection. More information about the various codes is included in the second part of the news and in the respective 'Help' section of Web Hosting Control Panel. In the last field of the section - 'Redirect URL' - the customer needs to enter the full path of the new URL where his/her web folder will be redirected. Note that, this URL can be an external one or hosted on one of our servers.

RedirectMatch Directive - This type of redirection service allows only specific items from a selected URL (web folder) to be redirected to a new URL. If the customer has selected this option, then the following three fields of the section should be filled in as explicated above, while in the fifth field - 'RedirectMatch URL' - the customer needs to enter the full path of the URL where the web folder items will be redirected, plus particular specifications for the redirection. For example, http://www.anotherserver.com$1.jpg . After that, regular expressions, that is defining the files that are to be redirected from the selected web folder, should be entered in the 'Regular Expressions' field. For example, (.*).gif$ will point that only files with .gif extension from the selected web folder will be redirected to the new URL.