Situation www.domain.com = main website www.domain.com/forum = vbulletin forum NOW they become www.domain.com = main website on server 1 www.forum.domain.com = vbulletin forum on server 2 Questions How to better redirect a subfolder to a subdomain so that I won't loose google trust and IBLs ? How to redirect so that the subdomain will work with www and without www ? And where to put the .htaccess file? cuz I understood the provider on server 2- where the subdomain is -does not want to activate the mod rewrite Thanks 4 your help
First of all, why on earth would you want www.forum.example.com as you forum domain. www in www.example.com is a subdomain. You should put your forum at forum.example.com NOT www.forum.example.com. People looking at your site are going to chuckle. Using www.subdomain.domain.tld is a sign of an inexperienced webmaster IMO. It looks unprofessional. You don't need www in front of a subdomain name. If you go with forum.example.com as your forum sub-domain, and NEVER link to it with that ridiculous www.forum.example.com domain name then you should never have to worry about someone linking to you WITH the www. But as I keep reiterating... www.forum.example.com is a really poor sub-domain (really a sub-sub-domain) name. That being said, the .htaccess file needs to be on the server where www.example.com lives because that is where the old forum directory (and forum itself) which is being redirected USED to live. As far as the new provider for not wanting to activate .htaccess, I'd consider a new provider. .htaccess is invaluable, and I would NEVER have another site, blog, forum, anything... without it. If you insist on sticking with www.forum.example.com you can either put the following in the .htaccess in your root folder: But that means the rule executes for EVERY page request on the site that didn't pass some other rule with the [L] flag. IMO it's a little more efficient to create a .htaccess file in the old /forum/ folder on your site with the following rule in it: That way the rule only gets executed when the client requests a page that lives under the old forum folder. If you decide to come to your senses and drop the www (sub-sub-domain) and go with forum.example.com then those equivalent versions of the rewrite rules above for forum.example.com would be: or respectively. Disclaimer: These have not been tested. I'm just winging them. If they don't work try posting the symptoms here and I'll try to help you out.
The subdomain is http://forum.domain.com - no www. The www falls away and is replaced by the name of the subdomain (forum in this case)