How does subdomain forward by domain registrar work?

Question

Can you please help me understand how this particular functionality works:

I have a domain: example.com, it's registered with GoDaddy. its nameservers are set to linode: ie. ns1.linode.com, ns2.linode.com But at the same time, I can setup a subdomain redirect on GoDaddy and it works. So, I can create a 301 redirect from www. -> non www.

Can you please tell me how GoDaddy can do this?

If you post the domain name, we might be able to tell you. There's not enough detail here to go on. — Bill Weiss, Nov 17 '09 at 17:13

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 17 '09 at 15:34

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Just because your DNS is hosted by dyndns doesn't mean that GoDaddy isn't doing the web hosting. So you can tell your GoDaddy webhosting to perform the 301 redirect as long as the DNS records for www are pointing at GoDaddy's web servers.

answered Nov 17 '09 at 15:34

womble

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Nameservers for this domain are pointing to Linode(ie. ns1.linode.com, ns2.linode.com) Godaddy is not hosting anything, except being the domain registrar. – Taras Mankovski Nov 17 '09 at 16:26
And who hosts the Web server? – bortzmeyer Nov 19 '09 at 08:44
@bortzmeyer: Precisely. @tarasm: What is the domain name, so we can investigate this for ourselves? – womble Nov 19 '09 at 09:43

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 17 '09 at 16:31

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301 Redirects are handled at the client-side. So when you redirect to something, no matter where it is hosted, the client will do the name lookup and go to wherever that resolves.

answered Nov 17 '09 at 16:31

Alex

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@Alex, I understand how 301 Redirect works. I'm trying to understand: "How the registrar has ability to setup a 301 Redirect, even though the DNS records are hosted on a completely different server and company." – Taras Mankovski Nov 17 '09 at 17:30
Perhaps I am misunderstanding the question. It doesn't matter who owns the name. You can 301 redirect to anything. – Alex Nov 17 '09 at 17:44
Yeah, that's not what I'm asking. I want to know how technically it works. What specific technology or aspect of networking functionality is giving Godaddy ability to do this. – Taras Mankovski Nov 17 '09 at 18:50
@tarasm: The fact that the A record for whatever domain you're talking about is pointing at Godaddy's web servers. – womble Nov 19 '09 at 09:44

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 18 '09 at 09:28

All sounds a little confused. From what I can interpret, from the GoDaddy domain manager you are able to cause www.example.com to 301 redirect to example.com.

I'm fairly familiar with the GD domain manager and I don't recall this functionality. I would guess that:

Your 301 redirect is coming from the site's hosting (.htaccess or whatever) rather than the domain hosting.
One of GoDaddy's domain forwarding features is at play, in which case there is a misconfiguration.

How does subdomain forward by domain registrar work?

3 Answers3