Hi Everyone,

 

This is my first posting on this forum.

 

Several years ago, I built my first website and ran it on a BT server. It was in the days of dial-up and the package I subscribed to was Pay-As-You-Go. Since then, I now have my own domain, which is not hosted by BT. I would like to set up an HTTP 301 redirect to direct visitors from www.btinternet.com/~J.P.Coates to www.mirfieldinpictures.net. I tried setting up PHP, ASP and .htaccess redirects - all to no avail. I tried all these because I'm not sure what OS is used on the BT server. Nor do I know if it supports Apache. Hence, this e-mail. Can anyone advise me?

 

BTW, I've tried the obvious - contacting BT but all I got for my efforts was a bad headache!

 

I hope someone can help me.

 

Thanks,

 

JPC

try using javascript then you take away the server issue

Hi Daemon Byte,

 

Thanks for the reply. Is using Javascript search-engine friendly?

 

JPC

as I understand it google won't reference javascript. All I can suggest is on the page with the javascript redirect put a html anchor link and the bot can follow that.

I now know that I'm using Apache, although I don't know which version. Having scoured the net, it would appear that I need to create an httpd.conf or .htaccess file. When I tried previously, I was unable to upload a .htaccess file to the BT server. The basic syntax appears to be:

 

Redirect 301 / http://www.mynewsite.com

 

I notice that the above is sometimes included in <VirtualHost.............</VirtualHost>.

 

I need guidance.

 

JPC

The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website

 

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

 

REPLACE domain.com and www.newdomain.com with your actual domain name.

As my old website is www.btinternet.com/~J.P.Coates, I presume that I need to replace domain.com with btinternet.com/~J.P.Coates? I'll give this a try but the last time I tried uploading a .htaccess file, it wouldn't let me. So, I uploaded the file as htaccess.txt then renamed it to .htaccess but that wasn't acceptable either. I did remove the index.html file, which is the only html file uploaded to the BT server.

 

Thanks.

 

JPC

I have never used apache redirect on a shared hoster but I would assume it would have to be btinternet.com/~j.p..coates as the old domain. I would imagine that it's not allowed because bt is protecting their server from abuse. Hope you get it sorted.

I'm having problems creating a .htaccess file and would welcome suggestions. I started out by creating a Notepad document - htaccess.txt. This document was then uploaded successfully to the BT server. Then I tried to rename it on the server to .htaccess but without success. I used FileZilla as the FTP client. Does anyone know why I can't rename it? Alternatively, is there another way of creating a .htaccess file?

 

JPC

I would imagine that bt is blocking you from renaming it. Most likely they are fearful somebody would abuse the .htaccess files for some malious purpose.