Whenever some requests a file from your server, the apache server checks for the .htaccess file and can make necessary alterations to the request.

When you move your site permanently, you should use one of these .htaccess files in order to point your addon domain to the consolidated domain.

Setting up .htaccess is very easy. Just login to your addon domain and simply locate the .htaccess file. If you want to redirect all the trafic from the domain, you need to add this line:

redirect 301 / http://www.consolidateddomain.com

And that’s it You can use any text editor in order to make this change.

If you just want to redirect a specific page, you should use redirect 301 /specific_page.html http://www.consolidateddomain.com/specific_page.html

Enjoy your automatic redirect

First, open your cpanel, usually by typing www.yourdomain.com/cpanel

Login using your credentials.

Identify your Domains group and click the Addon Domains button

Add your addon domain details:

The New Domain Name is actually the domain you want to add. Nothing more, nothing less

The Subdomain/FTP Username is the subdomain that will automatically be created for your addon domain. For example, if your main hosting account is yourdomain.com, the addon domain will be reacheable from yourotherdomain.yourdomain.com, where yourotherdomain is the value you input here. Of course, you can specify any other name here, even mycrazydomain. This will not affect the URL that you use to reach the addon domain, which will be yourotherdomain.com

As a best practice however, it is recommended to use as subdomain the name of the addon domain. Of course, if you have like yourotherdomain.com and yourotherdomain.info, this is not possible. In these situations, you would normally use yourotherdomaincom and yourotherdomaininfo as subdomains, so you can easily keep track of what’s going on.

Also, please note that the subdomain will also be used as FTP username to connect to the Document Root for the addon domain. Also, the username is in the following format (yourotherdomain@yourdomain.com) So, if you will use yourotherdomain as a username it’s more likely to fail to authenticate because most of the shared hosting providers have multiple accounts on the same server and for example, if I have a john username, someone else might have the same username. This is the reason why the username is always being appended the @yourdomain.com where yourdomain.com is the main account domain.

The Document Root is the place where the content of your addon domain will be hosted (the one accessible from yourotherdomain.com) As a best practice, its recommended to have it in the public_html folder, with the name of the domain as folder. For example: /public_html/yourotherdomain.com and /public_html/yourotherdomain.info

Always create these folders, even if you don’t use them (maybe because you redirect from yourotherdomain.info to yourotherdomain.com) It’s a good practice to have them, even if in the end they will be empty.

For the password, this refers to the FTP connection and I would recommend you to use the password generator for more safety and security. Note this password in a safe place where hackers cannot reach it.

Now, click Add Domain and you are done. If you’ve correctly set up the nameservers, in a couple of hours (max. 24 depending on your configuration) the new domain will be accessible from the Document Root