Hosting & Multiple Domain Names...

[LWA]

All,
Here's the situation...

My brother has two domain names www.namehere.co.uk & www.namehere.com (obviously not the correct URL!)

He is also has some hosting that is setup (QiQ - different company to the domain names) for namehere.co.uk.

Now as I understand it the domain names name servers have to be changed to the ones provided by the hosting company.

Is that everything that has to be done? How do you tell the hosting to expect multiple domain names?

Situation at the moment is:

namehere.com - directs to the site correctly
www.namehere.co.uk - cannot find!
www.namehere.com - shows the hosting holding page

Apologies if these are daft questions, my knowledge is lacking in these areas....

Thanks,
Leon

[tiggerai]

It's one way to be done... or you can change the A records to point to the hosting company. Then I assume you have DNS control on the hosting control panel so that you can set the records up...

if namehere.com directs successfully then you're just missing a record to say that www. points to the same place. namehere.co.uk will need to do something similar.

Catch me on MSN later and I'll get it all sorted out for you while windows 7 is installin'.

Tigz, The friendly Web developer type.

[LWA]

Thanks Rai - I hate not knowing stuff! Hence I shall ask the experts

And as the Name Servers have not propagated yet why can I get to http://namehere.com ?

Arghhh!

[tiggerai]

Did one domain name get set up as part of the hosting?? (ie was the hosting done after the domain names?)

Not sure until I can talk it all through later...

(and you can't know everything... there's loads I don't know about what you do for your job!)

[LWA]

Okay will do...

What's the difference between:

http://namehere.com & http://www.namehere.com ?

Is that two different domain names?

[tiggerai]

the www. is technically a subdomain and then can be pointed elsewhere if needed. namehere is the hostname, www. is the subdomain of namehere.com

(should have been an Internet Engineer Leon... They always were better, hehe)

A domain name is a name like "example.com, which you buy from a domain name registrar. Subdomain names have a prefix added to the domain name, like "www.example.com" or "ftp.example.com". Normally, when you host your domain with a web host, the latter will create a number of subdomain names for your domain, like "www.example.com", "mail.example.com", "ftp.example.com" and so on, each with a different function. Domains and subdomains are often assigned to a particular address and machine on the internet. Each of these addresses/machines have at least one hostname, which may be "example.com" or "www.example.com", etc. Different hostnames may even share the same address and computer.

So to answer your question, yes they are... they are 2 seperate addresses (URL's) set up from the same hostname and will index differently on google (unless you tell them that it's the same domain...)

You might want to set up google analytics for your brother too.

[LWA]

Ah I understand now (I think).

I have been into the control panel of the domain names and done the following:

www.namehere.com - updated the name servers to point at the hosting
www.namehere.co.uk - placed a forwarding on this to point at www.namehere.com

(I've left the name servers of the www.namehere.co.uk as the domain names original ones)

Think I'm getting somewhere....