www not working

[Voltio]

Hi everyone,
I have a customer that for some reson his website cannot be displayed when using the www in front of his domainname. When he only uses http:// and no www, his website displays without a problem. Do you know what may be wrong? I checkd if the www redirection file was created and it was:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 judits judits 11 Apr 6 20:20 www -> public_html/

Thanks

[Voltio]

It's weird. It's working now. I didn't do anything.

[JawadArshad]

lrwxrwxrwx 1 judits judits 11 Apr 6 20:20 www -> public_html/

The existence of this link does not determine whether a site will load with www or not on a cPanel server.

It's weird. It's working now. I didn't do anything.

It is most probably DNS related. You could do a simple 'ping www.yoursite.com' from your computer next time to see if its DNS related or not. Glad it is working for you now.

[B12Org]

The existence of this link does not determine whether a site will load with www or not on a cPanel server.

What does determine if the site will load with www or not on a cpanel server? (external to dns)

[JawadArshad]

What does determine if the site will load with www or not on a cpanel server? (external to dns)

ServerAlias settting in the VirtualHost of any site (in apache configuration file) contains www.domain.tld by default. This ensures www.domain.tld loads the same contents as domain.tld.

[B12Org]

is there a setting in cpanel that you can use to disable www or to enable it after domain creation - additionally is that setting present when creating a domain or is always assumed that both @none and www will be required and is thus setup ?

[cPanelJared]

is there a setting in cpanel that you can use to disable www or to enable it after domain creation - additionally is that setting present when creating a domain or is always assumed that both @none and www will be required and is thus setup ?

There is no option for this in cPanel. By default, with no option to override, the virtual host in the httpd.conf file is defined as the domain name only, with a ServerAlias directive for www followed by the domain name.

[cPanelJared]

Hi everyone,
I have a customer that for some reson his website cannot be displayed when using the www in front of his domainname. When he only uses http:// and no www, his website displays without a problem. Do you know what may be wrong? I checkd if the www redirection file was created and it was:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 judits judits 11 Apr 6 20:20 www -> public_html/

Thanks

The www symlink in an account's home directory has nothing to do with whether a site is displayed depending on whether you use the www prefix or not. It is only provided as a link to the public_html directory, to make it more obvious to which directory one should upload the site's content. It is not in any way connected to the Apache definitions that do control access with or without "www" in the URL.

It is not clear from the discussion in this thread exactly what caused your problem, which is now resolved, but there are at least a couple of possibilities:

• An A record for www.domain.tld may not have been created in the domain's zone file. This would have caused www.domain.tld not to resolve to an IP address, while domain.tld did resolve to an IP address.
• Some type of redirect may have been defined, most likely in the .htaccess file in the account's public_html directory, to redirect www.domain.tld to another location.

[JawadArshad]

Default account creation template in WHM does not contain an option to disable 'www'. However, you can simply change the www cname in the dns zone of the site to disable, or redirect www.domain.tld to some other location.
Not many clients need www.domain.tld pointing to different location in my experience so adding this feature would not be that beneficial. If I had to disable this on a single server, I would just edit default DNS template and modify this line below to use www record per my need.

www IN CNAME %domain%.

is there a setting in cpanel that you can use to disable www or to enable it after domain creation - additionally is that setting present when creating a domain or is always assumed that both @none and www will be required and is thus setup ?

[B12Org]

Thanks - In Plesk for example you have check a box during domain creation to enable www for a domain (its not checked by default) so we get some customers that miss it and need us to enable it after the fact - something that is easy enough to do, so I was just wondering how cpanel did it.

Thanks for clarifying for me

[jlshaw27]

ServerAlias settting in the VirtualHost of any site (in apache configuration file) contains www.domain.tld by default. This ensures www.domain.tld loads the same contents as domain.tld.

To further this point, I just had this same problem and when I checked the ServerName line in the apache configuration file (httpd), the hostname had "www." in front of it. From what I am told this creates a conflict in cpanel and the hostname should never contain "www". I erased the "www." and right away my site started working both ways.