Question

How to forward a domain to another domain?

Answer

NB: Currently domain forwarding comes with the following caveats:

• The creation of the forwarding is not real-time. Please wait up to 24 hours before everything is set up correctly (the DNS change, the forwarding itself, and the billing).
• There is no API call yet to activate this service
• Already created forwarders can be updated or deleted through the control panel, but please keep in mind that these changes are not real-time.

Domain forwarding can be enabled on the second step of the domain registration wizard by clicking on the Domain forwarding checkbox or for existing domains by clicking on the edit button on the details page.

* Domain forwarding is free with membership plans.

In order to configure it, click on Click to configure and navigate down to the Domain forwarding section.

Choose the Forwarding type and enter the destination URL.

NB: Be sure to add the protocol name (http://, https://, etc.) to the URL! The destination URL can be either http (without SSL) or https (with SSL). 

Forwarding type: permanent (301) vs temporary (302)

A 301 redirect means that the page has permanently moved to a new location.
A 302 redirect means that the move is only temporary. Search engines need to figure out whether to keep the old page or replace it with the one found at the new location. More information is available online.

Permanent

Permanent forwarding (HTTP status code: 301) indicates to search engines that the page has permanently moved to a new location. It almost fully passes page authority from an old URL to a new URL. While a visitor won’t notice the difference between temporary and permanent forwarding, for a search engine, these are completely different signals. Be careful about using 301 forwarding when it isn't permanent. If you remove a 301 redirect, be prepared to wait several weeks or even months to see the redirected URL back in the search engines' indexes. 

Temporary

Temporary forwarding (HTTP status code: 302) indicates that the page move is only temporary. By default, temporary forwarding does not pass any page authority from the old URL to a new URL. This forwarding type is rarely used, since in most cases you want to pass a page's authority, and only the 301 type will let you do that. Over time though, if temporary forwarding is in place for a long time - search engines start to regard the 302 forwarding as a 301 type, due to its permanent nature.

Important: If you use the Openprovider nameservers, an A-record will be set up automatically. In case third-party or your own nameservers are used, please ensure that the A-record for this domain in your DNS zone points to IP address 34.90.130.132.

Deleting or Updating forwarders

Already created forwarders can be updated or deleted through RCP (Reseller Control Panel) but please keep in mind that these changes are not real-time.

1. Navigate to Domains Overview
2. Search and click on the domain with forwarding enabled.
3. Click on Edit (pencil button)
4. Scroll to Domain forwarding section:
   1. Uncheck the 'Enable' option to delete forwarder**. 
   2. To update forwarding, select required 'Forwarding type' from drop-down and enter the new 'Destination URL' replacing the current one.
5. Click on 'Save changes'.

** If you are not using Openprovider nameservers for the domain, you will need to manually update the A record (34.90.130.132) for the domain after disabling domain forwarding. 

Troubleshooting

If forwarding doesn't within 24 hours, please run through the checklist below to make sure the configuration is finalized:

1. Make sure the A-record in the DNS zone of the domain is set to 34.90.130.132
2. Make sure (e.g. via the dig command line tool) that the A-record change is already replicated through the DNS hierarchy (can take up to 24 hours depending on your TTL settings on the DNS zone record)
3. If the above checks are successful - enter the domain name in your browser and confirm that it forwards to the right destination. In the case of browser caching, it is more safe to check via any public service that can show HTTP headers.
4. www. domain is not forwarding: create a CNAME record forwarding from www. to the naked domain.

Limitation

Forwarding works only from HTTP websites (source). This is due to the specifics of the forwarding implementation - in order to configure redirects from HTTPS we would need to store all of our customers' certificates on our servers.

Forwarding from a domain that has an active SSL certificate will not work until the SSL certificate on the destination domain covers the source domain as well. Both domains need to be secured by the same SSL multidomain (or wildcard) certificate.

The redirect only works for the "naked domain" and the domain with www. Subdomains are not supported.