Redirect Wildcard Subdomains to Primary Domain on Media Temple’s (dv) Hosting

In a recent post wherein I questioned the legitimacy of W3schools’ subdomains, someone pointed out that my own site was suffering from a somewhat related problem.

Basically, if anyone typed a random subdomain in place of the “www”, the subdomain would remain in place in the address bar without any redirection occurring. So for example, if you visited peanutbuttersandwich.impressivewebs.com, the site would display as normal, except with the “peanutbuttersandwich” part still intact.

What’s worse is that I have other domains on my current hosting plan, and impressivewebs.com is the primary domain. So if someone typed in a subdomain for one of the other domains, they would actually see the impressivewebs.com home page. For example, if you visited peanutbuttersandwich.webtoolsweekly.com, you would see the impressivewebs.com home page with the animationfillcode.com URL still in the address bar.

Not exactly something that someone would be likely to stumble across, nor is it an extremely urgent issue, but I think it should be fixed. So in this post I’ll be straying pretty far away from my usual front-end development-related posts, and I’ll be documenting, step by step, exactly what I did to fix this problem on my current dedicated-virtual Media Temple plan. Even if this information doesn’t apply to your current hosting plan, it might nonetheless serve as a reminder to get the problem fixed.

Section 1: Log in to Plesk and Add a New Subdomain

The steps in each of these sections prior to Section 5 are to be done for all non-primary domains in your (dv) hosting plan. For your primary domain, you’ll fix the subdomain problem using .htaccess (see Section 5 below).

First go to your Media Temple account center and log in. To the right of your domain list you should see the “Plesk” login button. Click that button and log in to Plesk with the necessary credentials.

Once into Plesk, click the “domains’ link in the left sidebar:

That will bring up a list of your domains. In there, choose any of the “control panel” options to the right of your domains.

From what I can tell, it doesn’t seem to matter which one of these control panel links you choose. It looks like they all just take you to the same basic “control panel” for all your domains. If anyone wants to correct me on that, please do.

Once inside your control panel, click on the “Websites & Domains” tab along the top navigation:

Once that page opens, you’ll see a list of your domains at the bottom of the page. Above that list you’ll see a link labelled “Add New Subdomain”. Choose that option:

You’ll then be presented with this screen:

This is where we’ll define a wildcard subdomain that will redirect to the primary domain. But the good thing is, this will not affect any real, working subdomains that you might have set up; this will only redirect random non-existent subdomains, and this will also help solve the problem of non-primary domains redirecting to the primary domain on the account.

Section 2: Define Your Wildcard Subdomains for Each Domain

On the “add new subdomain” page, you’ll want to fill in the info to define how to handle the wildcard subdomains. First, for the subdomain “name”, you have to choose a name that will definitely be listed last in a list of named subdomains. Media Temple’s support staff recommended “zz-wildcard”, so that’s what I chose.

Next, you want to make sure to select the correct domain in the drop-down list of domain names for your account. I would assume you’ll be fixing all domains, so in that case, you’ll have to repeat this section for each of the domains you want to fix. Just make sure you don’t inadvertently leave your primary domain as the chosen domain, because that will produce incorrect and possibly harmful results.

Finally, the screen presents you with an option to fill in called “Document root”, also referred to here as the website’s “home directory”. In this option, you want to fill in the exact name of the folder where your files are located for the selected domain. On Media Temple’s (dv) plan, this home directory name was set up when you set up the domain. For my own plan, unfortunately, I had set up the home directories in a non-standard way, so it was a little more complicated for me (See Section 6 below). But for most cases, it should just be a matter of putting in the original home directory name.

Once you fill in the correct info, click “OK” to create the subdomain.

Section 3: Log in With Root Access and Create a vhost.conf File

Now it gets a little more tricky. For those with little command-line experience, it’s a bit challenging. I do some of my command line stuff using PuTTY. Whatever you choose, you need to log in to your server with root access. Evidently you can also do this type of thing via FTP, but the settings in your FTP client are a little different.

Once you’ve logged in, navigate to the home directory of the domain you’re currently fixing (the one you selected when you created the wildcard subdomain in the previous section). In my case, this would mean navigating to:

/var/www/vhosts/selecteddomain.com/subdomains/zz-wildcard/conf

In this example, “selecteddomain.com” would be the name of the home directory that matches the domain you’re fixing. That directory should be empty. In there you want to create a vhosts.conf file. In PuTTY, I do this by typing:

vi vhost.conf

This creates a file called “vhost.conf” and opens it in a text editor in PuTTY. To start editing the empty file, type the letter “a” on the keyboard. This allows you to “INSERT” text into the file. In this file, you then type the following:

ServerAlias *.selecteddomain.com

Where, once again, you would replace the domain name with the domain name you’re dealing with. Once you’ve added this line to the vhost.conf file, hit “ESC” on your keyboard to stop editing the file. To save the file, type the following in PuTTY:

:w

And then hit enter. To exit the editor, you can use ctrl-z or type “:q” (quit). Finally, you need to restart the server so the new changes take effect. I did this using the following command:

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng -a -v

I believe there are other ways to do this, and I think you’d have the same effect if you just restarted the server from your Media Temple Account Center, but either way this seems to be a necessary final step to get the new configuration to take effect.

Section 4: Repeat for Each Domain

All the steps outlined above after you click on “control panel” need to be repeated for each domain that you want to fix. Just make sure you select the correct domain in the “Add New subdomain” section, and that you type in the correct home directory.

Also, for each domain, you have to navigate with root access to the respective “zz-wildcard” folder (or whatever you chose to call it), and create a new “vhost.conf” file with the configuration info specific to that domain.

The only domain that you don’t do this for is your primary domain.

Section 5: Fix the Primary Domain

Once you’ve corrected the wildcard subdomain issue on all your secondary domains, you’ll also need to do this with your primary domain. I don’t know squat about .htaccess stuff. Any .htaccess-related code that I ever use will be stuff I find through search.

Fortunately, Media Temple’s staff go above and beyond the call of duty, and one of their techs actually wrote a mod rewrite rule into my .htaccess file to get the subdomain problem fixed on my primary domain. Here’s the code:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteBase /
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.impressivewebs.com$ [NC]
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.impressivewebs.com/$1 [L,R=301]
</IfModule>

And that’s it. Now, if anyone tries to visit a random, non-existent subdomain on www.impressivewebs.com, they’ll just get redirected to the same page with the random subdomain replaced with “www”. Of course, if your domain doesn’t use “www” then you would need a different rewrite rule. All the best with that. :)

Section 6: My Non-Standard Setup

In my case, for some reason, I had set up my other domains as sub-folders of the primary domain. So the home directories were a bit weird and thus the wildcard thing didn’t quite work as expected. But once again, Media Temple’s staff went above and beyond and were able to fix the problem for me.

Basically, since my home directories were all located within my primary domain’s home directory, for each of these secondary home directories, I had to choose “z-selecteddomain” as the “document root” (See the last part of Section 2 above). Then, after creating the subdomain in Plesk, I created an .htaccess file in the new folder with the following rewrite rule:

Redirect 301 / http://selecteddomain.com

This gets done for each domain (except primary). Also the “z-selecteddomain” document root folder could be anything; this name was chosen by the tech to help group them together at the bottom of the folders list.

I really have no idea why my sub folders were configured in this way (it’s not a wrong setup, it’s just unconventional), but this redirect helped iron things out so that the wildcard subdomains were pointing to the correct location.

Conclusion

I’m obviously not a server admin, so what I’ve written above is just a superficial step-by-step reconstruction of what I did to solve this problem.

One of the benefits to having no random wildcard subdomains is the problem of duplicate content for SEO purposes. As it was before, theoretically someone could have linked to any one of my pages using a random subdomain, and if Google indexed the page in that state, it could have created a duplicate content problem. Not that you would necessarily be penalized for such a thing, but I suppose PageRank or overall backlink juice would be split if that were the case.

I also have a few client websites hosted on my account, so imagine how the client would have reacted if they had typed a random subdomain in front of their URL and saw the home page for impressivewebs.com. Not very professional looking, so even though it’s extremely unlikely anyone would notice such a thing, it’s still something that should be fixed.

And of course, if anyone has anything to add or correct, or knows of a way to do this purely with .htaccess (which I don’t think is possible, but who knows?), please offer your feedback.