Setup guide: redirect your naked domains on Strato

Redirecting your naked domains on Strato is not as easy as it should be. But don\t worry, we will show you the necessary steps to redirect your naked domain to your www domain:

Step 01: check that your www domain is set up properly

You need to make sure that your www domain is set up correctly and is indeed pointing to Strato — if you acquired your domain through a Strato webhosting package, you can skip this step. If you have bought your domain from a domain provider such as GoDaddy or NameCheap, please go directly to your domain provider, log into your account and check that the CNAME Record for your www domain is setup correctly and pointing to Strato. You will find your CNAME records in the DNS settings of your domain.

Step 02: Redirect your naked domain

The whole process unfortunately is a bit time consuming. NakedSSL streamlines this process and helps you save time. Check now to see if we can redirect your naked domain to your www domain:

First things first: please ensure that you own SSL certificates for your domains — for now, we will call your website yourdomain.com, this should however be your domain. To ensure that redirecting from https://yourdomain.com to https://www.yourdomain.com is possible, we will need a SSL certificate as the browser has to first establish the SSL connection before the redirect. You really need to have a valid SSL certificate for both your www and naked domains, otherwise the redirect will fail. You can acquire a certificate from any major SSL certificate provider of your choice — there isn't one that's better than the others. Once you have your certificates, you need to install them directly on your webserver. Here are 2 different ways to do it and some code snippets for you to copy and paste:

1. Use if-condition in Nginx configuration:

server {
    listen 443;
    server_name domain.com;
    if ($host = domain.com) {
        rewrite ^(.*) https://www.domain.com:443$request_uri? permanent;
    }
}

2. Create a 301 redirect for your apex domain:

server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    server_name example.com www.example.com;
    
    return 301 https://www.example.com$request_uri;
}

server {
    listen 443 ssl http2;
    listen [::]:443 ssl http2;
    server_name example.com;
    
    return 301 https://www.example.com$request_uri;
}

server {
    listen 443 ssl http2;
    listen [::]:443 ssl http2;
    server_name www.example.com;
    
    ====>>> Your site configuration goes here <<======
}

Seems too complicated? NakedSSL is save, easy, and fast to use and will guide you through the process in 3 easy steps, you don't even have to write any code or change your server setup besides adjusting your DNS settings.