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Twice in this past year or so, I have encountered a domain name behavior that I haven't seen since I started working with websites in 1997. The behavior is that the domain is going to another site that is totally irrelevant to the site owner. In both cases, the setup was done by someone else, and I've inherited the problem. Also, this time, I have documented most of the steps I've taken.

  1. It's not a browser redirect compromise because I asked the site owner to load the site from their location, and they got the same results that I did.
  2. The domain is registered with GoDaddy.
  3. ICANN lookup shows the domain pointed to InMotionHosting's DNS, as it should be.
  4. It seems that the domain was not added into CPanel at the time that it was pointed at the host.
  5. How does it happen that the host had the domain pointed at another site?
Nora McDougall-Collins
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  • Your question is offtopic here as not related to programming (and you are not giving any actionable details), but in any cases for: "ICANN lookup shows" does that mean you do DNS queries (which is the only thing relevant here, and this has nothing to do with ICANN)? If so, then the problem is only later in the nameserver or webserver configurations. Did you ask the relevant companies? – Patrick Mevzek Nov 06 '19 at 19:49
  • I can add further information, as related to the .htaccess file. But, if all domain addressing and pointing issues are "not related to programming", I will remove the question. – Nora McDougall-Collins Nov 06 '19 at 21:54
  • This could be considered a topic of "scope". The relevant companies are willing to fix the problem, but not say what went wrong ... – Nora McDougall-Collins Nov 06 '19 at 22:02

1 Answers1

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After considerable thought, the closest answer I can come to is that this problem has to do with the switch from http to https. Possibly, when the site was moved to https, the .com address was not also moved, only the .org address. "The wrong site" took the former server space, so the .com, while directed to the former server space, was not directed to the same site.

This would explain why the redirects that existed in the .htaccess file were not working.

The host's tech support indicated that the .com address was pointed at a different server, but they could not ... or would not explain why. And, they seemed to have quite a challenge to direct it to the correct server and server space.

Nora McDougall-Collins
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