I wanted to share a service I found recently, redirect.center, a personal project by Udlei Nati that allows you to easily redirect your domain name just by changing its DNS settings—simple to implement and requiring no maintenance.

The service can be used for several different applications:

  • Redirect from the bare domain (aka apex, root or naked) to www.
  • Redirect from an old domain to a new domain, with or without preserving paths.
  • More complex migrations, which transform paths and query strings.

Server migration without updating DNS records

I host a handful of projects on a DigitalOcean Droplet. Migrating sites from one Droplet to another every other Ubuntu LTS release. Updating DNS records when switching between servers is a pain.

I’ve been playing with redirect.center to see whether it can help avoid some of this pain.

A canonical name (or CNAME) record is a type of DNS record that provides an alias for another domain.

We can create a single A record somewhere which points to our Droplet IP (for example dns.example.org). All our other domains can then reference this with a CNAME record, so www.example.com becomes an alias of dns.example.org.

Future changes to the Droplet IP address can be made with a single DNS record change of dns.example.org.

Unfortunately, CNAME cannot be used on the bare domain. This is where redirect.center comes in, it allows us to redirect users from the non-www domain to the www equivalent. The only limitation I’ve found to this approach is that it can’t redirect HTTPS requests—it doesn’t have your SSL certificate.

I need to experiment with DigitalOcean’s Reserved IPs, since this sounds like a perfect solution… I’ve never tried it before, but something to play with next.

Conclusion

I wanted to share the redirect.center service—if you need to quickly redirect domains, it might save you some time.

You’re placing a lot of trust in the provider. If the service was compromised, it could be used maliciously—namely by allowing a third party to modify and redirect traffic as they wish.

A paid service was being considered that would give more confidence for commercial use. It would also have allowed for redirecting from the HTTPS protocol. However, there is no sign that this will be taken forward.

For personal use, I think it’s an amazing service. It provides a simple way to set up redirection from one domain name to another—quick and free!