intuitive engineering

I checked just for grins. If you are running Linux or some variant of UNIX, /etc/hosts is your (testing) friend.

I placed an entry for the hostgator IP address pointing to my primary domain. A UNIX host will check files first, DNS second [1]. If I point the browser to https://primarydomain.com, I get:

an information.com redirect from hostgator

The redirect is still there.

I ran my sites on https for quite awhile. Many of the search results I have in google point to that https:// URL. Think about that.

If https:// redirects properly to http://, there is no issue at all. If the https:// times out, many users will figure it out, again, not much of an issue. At the very least they’ll think maybe the site is down, and quite possibly try again.

Eventually the search results will reflect the current addressing.

If those users get to a site that appears as if it is supposed to be at that address — the result page for that hostgator redirect looks very similar to many of the pages parked on domain names no longer in use — that pretty much drops that user out completely. He got to the site, he got an apparently valid response. It no longer exists anymore, for him. That’s destructive, damaging.

And the thing is, it’s MY domain name. Not theirs. I thought it up, I registered it. It directs to my creativity, my writing. Not in any way, shape or form is this redirection an acceptable behavior. It is an action allied with the dark side, done because they can, not because it is right.

— dsm

[1] Note

You can change the order in which a host resolves network addressing, and many other pieces of network data in /etc/nsswitch.conf.

By default most distributions have the entry “hosts: files dns”. Some include “nis”. This file can change the default behavior.

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Tags: website