URL REDIRECT Service Available

Publish Date: Tuesday, November 18, 2008

New service has been introduced in our web hosting system - URL Redirection, and is available for activation, as of today, from the customers' Web Hosting Control Panel. Each customer of ours who wishes or needs to redirect a certain URL hosted in his/her account, can do so by going to the new URL Protect & Redirect section (former 'Password Protected Areas') in their Control Panel and following the easy wizard in the section's in-house developed interface.

The new functionality is easy to operate with and equally suited for beginners and advanced users. Customers need to choose first the type of redirection: regular - 'Redirect Directive', or defined - 'RedirectMatch Directive'. The first option is easy to set up by all type of users, even the least experienced ones, the second requires defining of certain criteria that need to be matched for the redirection to be performed, for which more specific technical knowledge is needed. Let's review the setup of both options more closely:

Redirect Directive - After customers select this option in the 'Choose Redirect method' field, they need to pick a desired domain from the dropdown below and then specify the path of the URL that they wish to redirect. Next setting is selecting an HTTP status code for the redirection. More information about the different codes is included in the second part of this news and in the respective 'Help' section of Web Hosting Control Panel. In the last field - 'Redirect URL' - the customer must enter the full path of the URL to which his/her web folder will be redirected. This URL may be hosted on our server, but may be also a remote one.

RedirectMatch Directive - This type of redirection service allows only specific items from a selected URL (web folder) to be redirected to a new URL. If the customer has selected this type of service, then in addition to the above-explicated settings about domain/sub domain, path of the web folder to be redirected, and an HTTP status code, the following specifications should be made:

• RedirectMatch URL - in this field the customer should specify the full URL, where the web folder will be redirected, and the additional parameters (regular expressions, see below) of the redirection. For example, http://www.anotherserver.com$1.jpg
• Regular Expression - the specifications that need to be entered here will give the special parameters of the redirection. For example, (.*).gif$ will point that only files with .gif extension from the selected web folder will be redirected to the new URL.

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 customers will enjoy working with our new in-house built software tool. Expect more introductions soon!

With Best Regards, from Lonex Web Hosting

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