2 Domians 1 Site

grizzly

I'm green to website design. I've been asked to help sort out a problem in work with a site and am looking for any advice. At the moment a client has a site with 2 domians pointing to it (.ie and .co.uk). I've checked on whois and the files seem to be with the same hosting company so I'm guessing as it's the same site both domains are pointing to identical files in one location.

Now the site will split into a .ie version and .co.uk version. What would be the standard way of approaching this? I'll get the login details for the hosted files tomorrow. Will I have to create an alternate index file in another folder and relink the domain to this? Does this process of linking have a name (DNS?)? I imagine this would be done through the control panel of the hosting company (or does the use of a domain require a key/password as well).

Sorry for the vague and rambling nature of this post. I'm trying to get my head around lots of different concepts.

thanks

smcelhinney

My suggestion would be to use ServerAlias (for Apache, or the equivalent for your set up). In an Apache httpd.conf file, this would appear as

ServerName example.ie
ServerAlias example.co.uk

which would effectively go to the same site. You could then do one of two things:

• Have the user select which site they want to see, on a default splash page.
• Sniff the locale of the browser, and redirect to a subfolder containing the files pertaining to that locale (for example, en-gb would be UK, en-ie would be Ireland).

Would have to be careful here though, you dont want to "lock" people to a specific site based on their locale, you should give them the option to change.

Final point, you need to be authoritative for both domains, and set up A records for each in DNS which go to the same IP or load balancer.

Hope this gives you a starting point.

sineadw

Or maybe you could do as you said - create/copy the files into a folder on a sub-domain and then create an Add On Domain?