[SOLVED] Bluehost parallel installation question - recommendations needed

[Mister Denial]

Hi folks,

I am with Bluehost, and currently have a shop running on a different shopping system, no Prestashop. I will be moving to Prestashop 1.4 as soon as a stable version releases. Until then, I was hoping to already start encoding products, as I have a lot of them, and then just switch websites once my PS store is ready.

My idea was to install PS on a subfolder in my Bluehost account, and then, once it is ready, point my domain name to that subfolder. Is that a good idea, bad idea? Are there better ways to do this?

I need to keep my current website running AND be able to use the new Prestashop installation.

If you have any experience with Bluehost or a good way to do this, input would be much appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

Mister D

[ddoan2007]

Hi,

With Bluehost, by default the primary domain always start from the root directory. So you will have do a bit of work to tell the primary domain that it is now in a subfolder. Look in the help/knowledge base for instructions. Good luck.

[mytheory.]

Yes the OP is correct. For one of our sites... I wanted to keep things cleaner by installing PS in a sub directory instead of the main directory with other domain/sub-domain folders.

So for the main domain you do have to redirect using .htaccess from the main (public_html) directory to a subdirectory of your choosing. For other domains or subdomains bluehost automatically creates a new subdirectory.

Read here for the actual script: http://helpdesk.bluehost.com/index.php/kb/article/000347

HTH!

[Mister Denial]

Hi there,

thank you for your feedback and input. An .htaccess redirect is a good idea, that will definitely work. Another idea I had was like placing an index.php file into the root folder of the domain, which then causes the shop to load in it's subfolder.

For example, if my Prestashop folder would be /shop:
www.mydomain.com - here I'd put the index.php file

which would then load the store here:

www.mydomain.com/shop

Is that possible? And if yes, are there any drawbacks to this?

Best regards,

Dan

[jamestaylor]

Hi Mister Denial,

I have an hosting with bluehost. I'm waiting for the 1.4 final version of Prestashop to launch my website.
How I do it ? I have created an subdomain like shop.mydomain.com and redirect the main domain to the folder /shop and it works perfectly.

You can just redirect your main domain to a folder.

My english is not good.

Thx

[mytheory.]

Hi,

I think it's generally a better method to use your .htaccess file... but I guess if you didn't want to enable .htaccess maybe for security reasons, you could use a php redirect script.

However, from my limited experience, those redirects have some speed implications. B/C it first looks for that "site" but then it tells it to redirect so then it goes to the second step of redirecting. Whereas, .htaccess's directions are executed almost instantly when the server is invoked.

Also, by using the .htaccess file you can implement a 301 (permanent) redirect... which is the preferred method if you plan to keep it that way for a while. The main reason is that it eliminates duplicate content and also helps with seo as far as google sees it. I haven't messed around with php redirects at least not on my important sites... so I'm not sure if there is an option to implement a 301 redirect. But for all purposes I highly recommend using the 301 (permanent) redirect.

HTH!

[Mister Denial]

@ jamestaylor: thanks for the feedback. I have thought about this solution too, but was not sure whether Google would "rate" this subfolder equally well as it would "rate" the main folder. Using this method, does Google consider this subfolder to be the new root folder for the domain? And btw, your English is really good, so no worries!

@ mytheory: thanks for the info, was definitely not planning to do a php redirect, I was more thinking along the lines of taking the full index.php file for prestashop and putting it into the root folder, while the rest of the files stay in a /shop subfolder. Don't know if this is feasible though, and if it has any benefits or drawbacks.

As for the .htacess 301 redirect, does Google rate websites that are redirected to a different domain folder differently than websites whose index and files are in the root directory?

Thanks a lot for the help, it's much appreciated!

[mytheory.]

Ithink if you do a permanent (301) redirect whether its to a different domain, site, folder, etc... google won't penalize you for it.

Yea that's interesting I don't know how using the PS index.php like that would work... I think its possible, but you would have to modify some core files or the index file so it knows to look in the subfolder for all the other files. Might be as easy as a 1 line change, or a couple of lines of code to several files and lines of code that need to be modified with a major headache. I honestly dont know how this would work... but I'm pretty confident that placing just the index.php in the main folder won't cut it, it would need to know what folders to look in.

If you do a 301 redirect you should be fine.. but if you place an index.php file in a different directory, I'm not too sure how that would be handled. You would still need to have some kind of 301 redirect (not sure how this would be done). But technically your PS subfolder would be just another folder under your root directory, just like any other folder under your PS directory. IE. http://www.mysite.com/PS_SUB/img/p/1-1.jpg instead of http://www.mysite.com/img/p/1-1.jpg.

To be honest, I think your best bet is to use the .htaccess file. It's more commonly accepted (and probably for a reason) and it would be lot easier and cleaner. And you would know it works, since I've done this and we haven't had a problem since we started hosting with bluehost.

HTH!

[Mister Denial]

Ok, one last question, considering you're also using Bluehost, why did you chose the htaccess solution rather that using the domain manager to point your domain to that subfolder?

What you said about htaccess sounds logical and probably will be the way I'll go too, but I just wanted to check all options before investing countless hours of populating my shop with items.

Thanks again!

[mytheory.]

Um... if my memory serves me right. I did that because I couldn't get the cpanel domain manager redirect feature to work for the main domain. I could only get it setup for my other add-on domains. So I contacted their support and they pointed me to that knowledge base from the link above. That's what they told me I need to do to redirect my primary domain to a subfolder/directory.

Yea I totally understand. I was in the same position. I came from a windows server, so I didn't know anything about.htaccess so I asked the professionals and did some google research and that's how I ultimately decided to do what I did.

HTH!

[Mister Denial]

I'm more a merchant type user than a programmer or code expert, so while I do understand some technical details, I am absolutely dependent on advice of more experienced users - so yeah, your input on how, why and what was done to solve a problem is very much appreciated!

I understand why you went with .htaccess, it looks like the easiest solution to put in place and the one recommended by Bluehost at that, so I'll just go with it and declare this thread as solved! Thanks!

And thanks to everyone who helped with their advice and experience! It's a great community we have here!

[ScubaLessonsInc]

how does that affect other redirects you may have in place.. for example the www.domain.com or domain.com to https://www.domain.com
or landingpage.com to https://www.domain.com
???
Do they go before or after? can one cancel the other?? sooo curious?