Sean’s Blog

This weekend I was working to setup a new blog that I have been getting ready.  I had the wordpress installation all set and ready to go and I ordered the domain name from GoDaddy.com.  I then pointed the new domain at the directory on the webserver that would be hosting the new site and set it up as an addon domain.  Everything looked good until I tried to navigate to the site.

When I actually when to the new site (we’ll call it addon.com) it redirected me to the front page of seanelavelle.com.  Now I know that the new blog was set up correctly on the webserver at http://seanelavelle.com/addon/ and the DNS record should point to the subdomain as addon.seanelavelle.com, but going to that address also seemed to redirect me to the main site.  I was at a loss.

After talking to Bluehost support we determined the problem was not DNS, but the Wordpress installation.  More after the jump

It turns out that Wordpress is picky about where it actually lives, and if you are putting it somewhere else you need to explicitly tell it that or it is going to assume it is at the root webdirectory. And for 99% of the cases this is fine.  But if you are hosting multiple blogs on multiple domains over the same site, you need to give it a little more instruction.

The good news is that this is accomplished very easily and there is no coding or mucking around through Wordpress internals.  Just go to the new blog in the Admin section and choose:

Settings->General Settings

Put the URL of new doing in the two URL boxes.  Once you save it, it should work fine.  One thing I have found is that the new URL will need to be http://addon.com instead of http://www.addon.com because Wordpress doesn’t like the redirects the webserver does.