New service is available in our customers’ Web Hosing Control Panel – URL Redirection, as of today! It allows customers to set up a redirection of any desired URL hosted on our servers to another URL – hosted with us or on a remote server. The new functionality has been incorporated in the former ‘Password Protected Areas’ section of the Control Panel, presently named – URL Protect & Redirect.

Both beginners and advanced users can take advantage of the new functionality. The ‘URL Redirect’ tool has a regular redirection option and a more advanced one (allowing redirection of chosen items only – from a given URL – matching defined criteria).

 

The service is very easy to set up. Customers need to choose first the type of redirection: regular – Redirect Directive, or defined – RedirectMatch Directive, then select a domain or a sub domain hosted with us from the dropdown available and enter the correct directory path (URL) of the web folder that is to be redirected. Very important part of the service is choosing a HTTP Status code – more information about the different codes follows below and is also included in the ‘Help’ section. After the customer has selected the desired URL path to be redirected and its HTTP status code, he/or she needs to type in the URL which the web folder will be redirected to and submit the form. If the customer has chosen to use the ‘RedirectMatch’ service, he/or she will need to fill in one more field – ‘Regular Expression’. This is exactly the place where the customer will have to define the specific conditions that must be matched for the redirection to be performed – the so called ‘regular expressions’. For example, the customer can specify that only files with .gif extension from the selected URL (web folder) should be redirected to the new URL. More details on how to enter the specifications can be found in the attached tooltip.

HTTP Status Codes

Customers should be very precise when selecting an HTTP status code for their URL redirection. Status codes explain the type and purpose of the URL redirection and also perform SEO function, that is – 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 the new functionality will be of good use to all our existing and future customers. Best Regards from our web hosting team! We’ll be back soon with more introductions!