How to serve another, externally hosted domain from an existing Edis webhosting package?

• Call the Edis support team and tell them that you want to serve the contents of an externally hosted domain with your existing standard webhosting webspace.
• In this call Edis will tell you that they'll add the domain to your account. If requested send them an email summarizing what you want. Be sure to include a note that the externally hosted domain should not be transferred.
• Create a sub-directory in your webspace (e.g. via FTP) from which you'll want to server the website.
• In the DNS records of your domain add a CNAME that points to your host at Edis (typically <your-username>.edis.at). Most likely you'll have to define a subdomain like www since it is forbidden to specify a CNAME for the root of the domain.
• Remove any pre-existing A records.
• If supported, define a URL DNS record for the root of the domain that redirects to http://www.<your-domain> with a HTTP status code of 301. Be aware that a URL DNS record might not be supported by your domain hoster since it's not in the DNS standard.
• Login to the Edis management interface, create the www sub-domain of your newly added domain and let it point to the previously chosen sub-directory in you webspace.

Tips and hints

• Changes in your DNS records might take a while (e.g. one hour) to propagate to DNS servers due to DNS caching.
• One could use nslookup on Windows and dig on Unix to debug DNS queries.
• Services such as Initializr may add a .htaccess file that includes url-writing rules making your site reachable with and without www. This can cause a redirect loop if you have defined a URL DNS record as described above. In this case just deactive those rewriting rules in .htaccess.