The new service that has been enabled in our customers’ Web Hosting Control Panel is worth focusing your attention indeed – URL Redirection. It allows customers to redirect any desired URL hosted on our servers to another one – hosted with us or on an external server. That’s a very convenient functionality, often needed in website setups. The configuring of the service is very easy and accessible to all users from the newly formed Web Hosting Control Panel section – URL Protect & Redirect (former ‘Password Protected Areas’).

There are two types of redirection service available to our customers to choose from: regular – ‘Redirect Directive’, and defined – ‘RedirectMatch Directive’. The first option is easy to set up and recommended to all types of users, as it makes a redirection of the whole content of a web folder (URL hosted on one of our servers) to another URL. The second redirection sets up a more specifically defined redirection and requires more advanced technical knowledge – it sends only chosen items from a selected web folder, corresponding to defined criteria (regular expressions), to the new URL.

Redirect Directive – If customers select this option in the ‘Choose Redirect method’ field of the section’s interface, they need to perform the following setup: pick from the dropdown below the domain or sub domain where the URL to be redirected is hosted, then specify the full name of the web folder (URL) path and choose an HTTP status code for the redirection. More information about the various codes is included in the second part of this post and in the respective ‘Help’ section of the Web Hosting Control Panel. In the last field of the section – ‘Redirect URL’ – customers need to input the full path of the new URL where their web folder will be redirected. Mind that, this URL can be an external one, not hosted our servers.

RedirectMatch Directive - This type of redirection service sends to the new URL only particular items from a web folder, defined beforehand in the ‘Regular Expressions’ field. If customers select this option, then fields 2 – 4 should be filled in the way it’s explicated above, while in the fifth field – ‘RedirectMatch URL’ – customers need to input the full path of the URL where the defined web folder items will be redirected, plus additional specification for the redirection. For example, http://www.anotherserver.com$1.jpg. Last the ‘Regular Expression’ field should be filled in, where particular definition of which files are to be redirected to the new URL should be done. For example, (.*).gif$ specifies that only files with .gif extension from the selected web folder will be redirected to the new URL.

HTTP Status Codes

Choosing an appropriate status code for your redirection is very important indeed. Status codes explain to the visitors of your page (the redirected URL) the type and purpose of the redirection, and also perform SEO function – optimize the redirected URL for all search engines. The possible to set HTTP response status codes are – 301, 302, 303, 410:

Permanent redirection: 301 – The requested URL has been assigned a new permanent URL and any future references to this resource should use one of the returned URLs. When a URL returns a 301 redirect, it means that the owner of the link asks users to use the new address, which they’ve been redirected to.

Temporary redirection: 302 - The requested URL resides temporarily under a different URL. When a URL returns a 302 redirect, it means that the owner of the link asks users to continue to use the original address as the redirect might be modified at some time later.

See Other redirection: 303 – The response to the requested URL can be found under a different URL and SHOULD be retrieved using a GET method on that resource. When a URL returns a 303 redirect, it means that the owner of this link redirects the user to another page which is not a substitute of the originally requested page. This method is very popular when you redirect a visitor to a ‘Thank you’ page after filling in a page.

Gone status code: 410 – The requested URL is no longer available on the server and no forwarding address is known. When a URL returns a 410 redirect, it means that the requested page does not exist anymore.

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We hope that all NTC customers will enjoy working with the new software. Any comments or feedback on the usability of the section’s interface, or other issues related to the new URL redirection tool, are more than welcome! We’ll be back soon with more web hosting introductions.

With Best Regards, from the team of NTC

Tags: domain, file extension, HTTP status code, redirect directive, redirected URL, redirectmatch directive, regular expression, server, sub domain, URL, URL Protect & Redirect, URL redirection, web folder, web hosting control panel, website setup

This entry was posted on Friday, November 21st, 2008 at 12:28 pm and is filed under Latest News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.