Can you do a 301 redirect without a hosting account?

[TitanDigital]

Trying to retire domain1 and 301 it to domain2 - just don't want to get stuck having to pay the old hosting provider simply to serve a .htaccess file with the redirect rule.

[NakulGoyal]

Some domain management companies let you do a 301 redirect of a domain to another domain...however they might only do domain.com to newdomain.com not specific/individual and customized redirects.

[eyepaq]

Hi,

Depending on your domain registar you can do URL forwarding (URL forwarding is in fact a fancy name for a 301 redirect). In this case you don't need a hosting account.

For example if you host with Godaddy you can easily do that using the control pannel of your domains.

What domain registar do you use ?

[matbennett]

You can do these with forwarding etc.  However that isn't the most efficient way.

What you want to do is to "park" the old domain on the new one.  In technical terms this means pointing the nameservers at the new hosting account and ensuring that there is MX record for them.  Most hosting companies do this for you or have a built in tool. It's very easy and is usually called "domain parking", "domain mapping" or "add on domains".

Doing that will ensure that visitors (and bots) visiting olddomain.com will be served newdomain.com

With that working you can just add an .htaccess rule on newdomain.com to ensure that it 301s correctly to newdomain.com . The same directive can tidy up all your subdomain woes at the same time!

This method has the least points of failiure and creates the fewest redirects. It's also generally the cheapest and easiest to manage. Win!

[ThompsonPaul]

NameCheap.com is another that will definitely let you 301-redirect one domain to another in the DNS admin (ie no hosting needed)

If you need multiple levels of redirecting, you could just set up the old site as an additional site on the server account that's hosting the new site, and install the htaccess file at its root, with no actual site installed. Then use the old domain's DNS to point to the new location containing the htaccess.

Paul

[TitanDigital]

Yep, I've created subdomain.newdomain.com and that has the htaccess file. Added a cname to my zonefiles to point to the subdomain. Seem to work like a treat so far