Forwarding service
By Arti on Tuesday 16 January 2007, 10:00 - Gandi - Permalink
Here we are, in the midst of change in the architecture of Gandi's system, and for which one of the projects is to allow you greater liberty in the management of your domain name.
Today we are happy to announce HTTP forwarding! Your domain name will shine all the more now that you can forward all your subdomains as you wish. An example will better illustrate this than a technical explanation:
You have just purchased the domain name "tothe-ground.com", and now have the possibility of creating many subdomains that each forward to a different URL!!
Imagine that your "ifell.tothe-ground.com" rather than "blog.tothe-ground.com", or "ftp.tothe-ground.com". The wildcard is also available of course (possibility of forwarding all non-existing subdomains to a specified URL).
And there, with joyful tears in your eyes, you will ask me about masked forwarding. Go ahead - you may sob with joy, because we put that in place today as well 
And as I have begun providing stupid examples, it is well that I keep it up:
You have just purchased your domain name, "DomainPowa.com", and have a nice home page at your ISP for which the URL is a bit less exciting than your domain name, and looks something like: http://members.myispihave.com/~brian69/domainpowasite.html ! Waaaaah, this is a great way to give tendinitis to your friends!
Ok, we will help you avoid going to the doctor: proceed to your domain administration page, enter your horribly long URL for the last time, activate, count to ten in French (or in English if you don't know that superb language), and finally test the new life of your domain
In addition to this (so as to do it right), we have also added 301 forwarding. Ok, I see your glistening eyes wide open...what is 301 forwarding and what good is it over the 302 forwarding already in place?
The main difference between these two method is in the interpretation that will be made by the search engines, and therefore in the linking to your site: 301 forwarding is "permanent", so search engines will index it directly in their databases, while 302 forwarding is more often (depending on the search engine) put in parenthesis as a temporary link to another web page that already has an address in their database.
For more information on these two types of forwarding, I suggest you have a look at RFC2616.
Comments
Please help me forward below blog adress to www.toprakana.org
http://toprakana-org2.blogspot.com/
Thanks
Cem Birder
Welcome to the bar Cem!
Actually - you want to do the reverse: forward your domain to your blog address to blogspot.
This is quite easy! Simply log into your domain's control panel, and in the Technical Settings part, (In the "Forwarding" column), after the line, "Web:", click on the "Update" link. This will bring up a page where you can specify the name of the website that you want to forward your domain to!
Creating your forwarding address:
Click on the "Create a forwarding address" button, and you will then be taken to a form where you can choose how you want to forward your domain.
I suggest the following set-up for you:
* Type of forwarding: choose "Masked" to keep your domain name in the URL address bar.
* Subdomain: leave empty or enter *
* Forwarding address: enter the address of your blog (http://toprakana-org2.blogspot.com/)
Then, submit this by clicking the "Create" button.
That's all! Your domain will forward to your blog shortly thereafter.
You have a free, ready-to-go blog with your Gandi domain too! If you would prefer using a blog at Gandi, and want to know more, please feel free to ask customer care any questions you may have about activating your GandiBlog, or click here!
Have fun!
Thanks for the new forwarding features -- they're wonderful. I have one question. I want my forwarded sites to look as much as possible as if I have my own servers. So I want masked forwarding, but I also want the search engine benefits of 301 forwarding. Do I get this with masked forwarding, or will the links to my pages continue to be marked as temporary?
More generally, what are the implications for search engine behaviour if I choose masked forwarding instead of 301 forwarding?
Thanks,
Allan
Hi Allanbb, nice to see you at the bar!
Gandi's masked forwarding uses frames, which is not ideal for search engine ranking (due to the way that search engines now look for, and rank content).
If you are interested in good search engine results, it would be best to stick with 301 forwarding, which we do provide of course.
Alternatively, you can apply your host's DNS to your domain in your Gandi control panel to point your domain to their servers, or if you want to use Gandi's DNS, you can point your A record to the address of your virtual host server.
If you would like help with any of these configurations, or want to discuss what options are best suited to your needs, please feel free to contact our Customer Care Dept!
Have fun!
Hi,
I run a web site based on Wikini, without URL rewriting. This means that the URLs of the pages on my site are something like (*) "http: //dynamo11.free.fr/wikini/wakka.php?wiki=Accueil".
This is typically what you describe as the "horribly long" URL. However it's quite ok, as long as I can refer to the page as "http://www.dynamo11.org/Accueil".
In the old days (that is, before you implemented the evolved forwarding service), I achieved this by setting the web redirection of "www.dynamo11.org" to "http: //dynamo11.free.fr/wikini/wakka.php?wiki=".
This would cause "http://www.dynamo11.org/Contact" to be rewritten as "http: //dynamo11.free.fr/wikini/wakka.php?wiki=/Contact", and a small PHP hack would do the trick.
Now since the implementation of the new forwarding service, all "http://www.dynamo11.org/Toto" URLs act as if the "Toto" part was absent.
I will keep investigating on my side to see if I can provide more info, but maybe you already heard of the problem?
Thanks in advance,
Bruno.
PS: I would like to avoid masked forwarding (because some people around me don't like frames...).
(*) I inserted a space in the long URLs so that they are not cut.