Website help

[Ben Thomas]

If you feel comfortable sharing the URL, perhaps if I/we visited it, we could determine if it's a caching issue. Other than that, something in your .htaccess is wrong, what have you got in there? Or is it just that?

 

[Systreg]

To be fair, I don't know why you'd want people to be redirected to www. It used to matter back in the day, but it doesn't matter at all now. I think it looks much better without the www

It's because I'm old and like things how they were , plus if someone goes to the site without www in front, it doesn't resolve, has to have the www for the site to show for whatever reason.

 

[cyberpunk]

it's a little checkbox under network tab, called "disable cache". when you have dev tools open and this is checked, all requests will be non-cached

 

[cyberpunk]

you may want to look at DNS config too, make sure there's an A record for @

 

[Systreg]

All that's in the file is the following:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]

Checked on downforeveryoneorjustme.com and that says not just me, the site is down. I'm sure the file name for .HTACCESS has to be in capitals, yes

 

[cyberpunk]

it's normally lowercase, linux is case sensitive too (if your server is running that)

 

[Systreg]

it's a little checkbox under network tab, called "disable cache". when you have dev tools open and this is checked, all requests will be non-cached

Ok, got it, ticked it but site still redirecting to domain.co.uk/domain.co.uk after going to the non www. version

you may want to look at DNS config too, make sure there's an A record for @

Sorry, I don't know what that means

Ok, renamed file name to lowercase, was sure I saw last night on Google it had to be uppercase.

 

[cyberpunk]

if "domainname.co.uk" is not resolving then you need to add an 'A' record to your DNS config to point the "naked domain", or "@" to the ip address of your server. The "www" can then become a CNAME record and point to "@"

 

[Ben Thomas]

Hm, starting to sound more like a DNS issue now. If it's not resolving without www. Pop into your zone settings and edit (or add) the A record for @. Add the IP address of the server. I'd still rather see domain.co.uk than www.domain.co.uk, but for the sake of usability www does need to resolve.

 

[Systreg]

I have no way to do settings like that, I've only got the Nominet control panel for adding nameservers, nothing else like records.

I remember I had to do that sort of stuff for 1 website a long time ago, and it was a nightmare trying to figure anything out, I ain't really got a clue when people mention A records and things pointing at @ symbols, and I didn't need to do that with any other sites I've made hosted on HostGator, so no idea why there's a problem with this new site.

 

[cyberpunk]

do HostGator offer DNS hosting? if not, create a free account at cloudflare and use them to manage your dns.

 

[cyberpunk]

what nameservers is the domain using now?

 

[Systreg]

I really don't want to use DNS stuff, I don't feel comfortable using it, it took ages to get a single site working a long time ago using that stuff, I just like setting nameservers and boom, done.

The nameservers set are correct as I use the same server names for other sites:

ns2587.hostgator.com
ns2588.hostgator.com

 

[cyberpunk]

ok, do you have access to cPanel at hostgator? you could add the A @ record there. you need to add it to resolve to the non-www domain unfortunately.

 

[cyberpunk]

if you pm the domain i can tell you whether the dns records are setup correctly

 

[Ben Thomas]

I'm lost. You have to use DNS to use a domain, so somewhere, you will have some control over your domain. If you're using Hostgator then I'd imagine there is some sort of control panel to add some DNS records, as you're using their nameservers that means they're controlling the DNS.

https://www.hostgator.com/help/article/changing-dns-records

But then you'd think Hostgator would automatically set up the most basic of A records? Seems a little strange.

 

[Systreg]

Ben, the only thing I've ever done with any of my websites, is set the nameservers to HostGator, upload the html files and the site is live, no DNS records at any point apart from setting the nameserver mames at Nominet.

On that link you gave, it says:

The first thing that you need to do to point your domain to your web hosting account is to set your name servers. It is preferred that you use name servers provided by HostGator, although it is possible to use your own.If you use your own, you will need to manually set the DNS Records.

If you use HostGator's name servers, most DNS records you need are generated for you automatically.

So yes, it appears that DNS records are set automatically by HostGator, and you only need to set up DNS stuff if using your own nameservers.

@cyberpunk took a look at my site via PM and said both www. and non www. were resolving for him and that it must be a caching problem at my end, as I still can"t get the non www. version to resolve for me.

 

[Systreg]

My site is still not resolving for me without www. in front of it, both work on my phone with and without the www. included.

I've cleared my cache, done start>cmd>ipconfig /flushdns and still getting nothing for the non www. site, it keeps changing the url to domain.co.uk/domain.co.uk

 

[cyberpunk]

Sounds like your browser is still caching it

You can check if it's working using curl. I just checked your domain and it seems fine.

root@cyberpunks:~# curl -v -i domain.co.uk > /dev/null

* Connected to domain.co.uk (x.x.x.x) port 80 (#0)
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> Host: domain.co.uk
> User-Agent: curl/7.64.0
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
< Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2020 11:43:53 GMT
< Server: Apache
< Location: http://www.domain.co.uk/
< Content-Length: 310
< Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

 

[Ben Thomas]

Try a different browser perhaps? Safari? Just to see if it's you.