SiteHost

Domain Aliases for Containers

Aliases allow you to setup additional domains or sub-domains that you would like to be able to use with your Container. For instance, setting up aliases you can connect the domain names example.com, example.co.nz and example.nz to the same Container, so all these domain names can render the same website content.

Adding Aliases

Each web container will initially have a 'www' alias already created, so you don't need to add those manually. The aliases for a Container can be easily modified, please consider the following steps to add aliases:

  1. When logged in to the SiteHost Control Panel, click the Containers module from the menu on the left.
  2. Click the Container Label from the list to open the Container management page.
  3. Click the Alias tab.
  4. Fill in the text box with your full domain name or subdomain.
  5. Hit Save Aliases button to confirm the change.

Removing Aliases

The process to remove an alias is very similar to the process of adding it. If that's required, do the following:

  1. When logged in to the SiteHost Control Panel, click the Containers module from the menu on the left.
  2. Click the Container Label from the list to open the Container management page.
  3. Click the Alias tab.
  4. Locate the alias you want to remove and put your mouse cursor over it. Click the red delete icon alongside the alias that you wish to remove.
  5. Hit Save Aliases button to confirm the change.

IDN Aliases

We support the use of Internationalised Domain Names as container aliases, so you can use characters like vowels with macrons (e.g: mā.example.com).

You will notice that special characters in your aliases will look a bit strange (our mā.example.com example will become xn--m-oha.example.com). This is because we store IDNs in an encoded format called punycode. We show you the punycode to prevent ambiguity between similar looking characters. For example, can you tell the difference between these two domain names?

  • example.com
  • еxamplе.com

The first uses the latin letter e, while the second uses the Cyrillic е. While superficially similar, these are in fact two completely distinct domain names. Rendering them in punycode makes this distinction clear:

  • example.com
  • xn--xampl-ywef.com

Please note that the DNS records for any aliases that you create must be configured to point to your server's IP address. This is particularly important when your container has SSL enabled. Please refer to our DNS Records article for more information on configuring these.