Domain Name Question

acharris · 24 Mar 2016 at 22:59

Hi all, I would like some advice. I am looking to change my current gaming website and change it's name to something more obvious. I was looking at a new domain name and I was wondering the following:

How would I go about changing my current domain name over to a new one I want to buy? probably a stupid question, but I can't find a definitive answer out there.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Anthony

Gzero · 24 Mar 2016 at 23:28

You don't.

You buy your new one and point it at the same IP address (yes you can have multiple domains pointing to the same IP) and let your old one expire.

mtalk · 25 Mar 2016 at 08:09

By pointing the new domain to the main public_html folder of your domain and updating DNS to point to the same server.

touch · 25 Mar 2016 at 10:34

mtalk said:
By pointing the new domain to the main public_html folder of your domain and updating DNS to point to the same server.

This. but the folder isnt necessarily called "public_html". Depends on your host.

Also, you may need to update the website. Wordpress, for example, has some references to the domain name stored in the database so these need to be changed (there's plugins that can do it for you)

Trucamo · 25 Mar 2016 at 16:52

Also some hosting solutions will not allow you access unless accessed via the domains they know about, this is the case for some shared or cloud hosting solutions like Azure where many public sites have the same IP but it is then routed using the accessed domain.

This can often be solved by adding your new domain to some setting in the hosts control panel, they may then check you are the actual registrar of that domain, either by comparing their known records or contacting the registrar.

Pho · 25 Mar 2016 at 19:57

Is your current site ranked on Google and do you care about the ranking, or are there other websites linking to content on your old site? If so you'll want to setup 301 redirects between the two sites. I.e., people going to www.example.com/something will be automatically redirected to www.example.org/something .

It's very easy to set-up but it's worth bearing in mind.

acharris · 25 Mar 2016 at 23:11

Thanks for the advice all. To be honest it is not ranked on Google and this is why I want to change the domain to something more related to gaming. I did notiice when I was looking around at redirects and seen the options in Cpanel. I use Vidahost and wordpress, so would have to look into the plugins to change references.

Thanks again all.

touch · 26 Mar 2016 at 00:06

I've used this plugin for updating wordpress urls before:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/go-live-update-urls/

Make sure you take a backup before doing it. If there is anything wrong with the setup of your new domain, you wont be able to get back into the wordpress admin again.

acharris · 26 Mar 2016 at 22:23

Thanks for the plugin link, saves me a little bit of work lol.

Thanks again.