If you build a website and map it to a custom address such as www.yourdomain.com, you can make it even easier for people to reach your site by typing simply yourdomain.com That web address without the www is called naked domain.
These days in the cloud era hosting of Naked domains with providers like SashiDo, Heroku, OpenShift and others it is a bit tricky, but not impossible.
You can simply do this by redirecting your naked domain address to the www.yourdomain.com
How to do it?
There are few easy ways to do it:
- Check out whether your DNS provider supports naked domains redirection.
- Buy a cheap VPS, install a webserver with redirection rule and add an A record to your DNS with the IP of the VPS.
- Use any other service that can do the things above. I'll suggest you one :)
Meet gowww.io redirect service for naked domains
Today I would like to show you the easiest way to handle the challenge with the naked domains www.gowww.io
The only thing you should do is go to your DNS provider and add the gowww.io IP address (the current IP address is 144.217.225.221) as an A record to your naked domain. See how the operation will look like if your domain is mydomain.com and you are using AWS Route53 DNS Service.
After filling in the IP address you just click on save and you are done. That's it!
How to test whether it is working?
The change you have made can take some time, because it depends on your TTL DNS settings. If you are using MacOS or Linux you can simply use nslookup or dig commands.
See how:
$ dig gowww.io
; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>> gowww.io
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 29329
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;gowww.io. IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
gowww.io. 59 IN A 144.217.225.221
;; Query time: 69 msec
;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1)
;; WHEN: Thu Nov 30 17:29:15 2017
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 42
Depending on your domain name if you see a line similar to this one, it means that you're in the game!
gowww.io. 59 IN A 144.217.225.221
If you don't like the black screen of the terminal you can always use some web service to check this out:
Features of gowww
Just in brief see what gowww will do for you.
- When you open your naked-domain.com it will redirect to www.naked-domain.com
- When you open your naked-domain.com but with https gowww will automatically issue a SSL certificate with Let's Encrypt and will redirect to https://www.naked-domain.com
Yes, I know. This is boring stuff and yes, gowww saves us a lot of time.
Fin
That's it, guys. I hope that this article has saved you a lot of time in digging and searching for a solution or doing stuff you don't like :)
If you are a SashiDo customer and you want to host your website or www.domain.com take a look at this tutorial:
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