cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Preparing for domain transfer, and pointing at my CGI space

catweazle9
Newbie
Posts: 6
Registered: ‎16-03-2011

Preparing for domain transfer, and pointing at my CGI space

I'm planning to do a hosting transfer of the domain caldecoteplaygroup.co.uk (registered at fasthosts) to force9 and to point this domain at my CGI area. The tutorial at http://usertools.plus.net/tutorials/id/14 indicates that I would need to create a CNAME record specifying some value for the Left field, such as "ccgi" or "www". Presumably this would then map ccgi.caldecoteplaygroup.co.uk (or www.caldecoteplaygroup.co.uk) to my CGI area. However, is it possible to instead map just caldecoteplaygroup.co.uk to the CGI area (i.e. without a prefix)?
Also, why does the above tutorial state that keeping the whole website on the CGI server is "not recommended"? Is it implying that specifying "www" as the Left field is treated specially and would also map the plain domainname (in my case caldecoteplaygroup.co.uk) to the CGI area I specify as the Right field? If so, I think this would be exactly what I want, although I'd like to understand why it's not recommended.
Thanks,
John.
3 REPLIES 3
Peter_Vaughan
Grafter
Posts: 14,469
Registered: ‎30-07-2007

Re: Preparing for domain transfer, and pointing at my CGI space

The tutorial was written many moons ago when the cgi server (which was before the ccgi webserver) was a pile of doodoo and ran very slowly. That comment no longer applies to the current ccgi webserver (although it still has its issues).
catweazle9
Newbie
Posts: 6
Registered: ‎16-03-2011

Re: Preparing for domain transfer, and pointing at my CGI space

So given the new ccgi webserver, is it possible for me to map caldecoteplaygroup.co.uk to my CGI space (http://ccgi.cooper9.force9.co.uk/), or will I have to choose some artificial prefix, so users have to type in www.caldecoteplayroup.co.uk or ccgi.caldecoteplaygroup.co.uk? I'd definitely prefer it if we could configure caldecoteplaygroup.co.uk (no prefix) to point directly at the CGI area, since the playgroup website has existed for some time (hosted elsewhere) and we want to move it without breaking users' links if they've bookmarked the old site.
Thanks,
John.
spraxyt
Resting Legend
Posts: 10,063
Thanks: 674
Fixes: 75
Registered: ‎06-04-2007

Re: Preparing for domain transfer, and pointing at my CGI space

DNS records are not my strong point but I don't think it's a problem to point the domain itself to your ccgi space. The DNS entry will be an A record rather than the CNAME variety. Once set up you might decide to add a CNAME to map www to the same place, so that if anyone does add the www subdomain to the URL it will still work. Generally a .htaccess rule would be used to correct that in the address line.
I think the first step is to point the name servers to ns1.force9.net and ns2.force9.net in your Fasthosts control panel then you will need to raise a ticket here to request hosting of the domain. Specify in your ticket where you want this to point, and I think Plusnet will set up the DNS records for you (including mapping domain mail to your account mail if desired (MX records)).
David
David