Domain Name Change

No, it's really that easy.

At worst you may have to change the $base_url variable in your settings.php, but it's unlikely that the other domain was ever coded into that file.

More of a trouble is when you have an established site and you have to update everything for all the search engines and whatnot.

Another trouble would be if people (foolishly) hard-coded the old domain into all the links on the site. Then you'd have to go through and change them all. Hopefully that's not the case for you.

If you have hand coded the URL in parts of the site (hopefully you have not), that may break some of your links. If you think that's an issue, you could cover your arse by adding/modifying your .htaccess file which should be placed in your webroot's directory.

With the code below in the .htaccess file, it would tell apache to automatically/permanently rewrite http://www.old-domain.com/link-to-some-page.html into http://www.new-domain.com/link-to-some-page.html

I haven't done this in a while but It might look something like this...

I am building a website for my wife and she is thinking about changing her domain name. One point that has not been mentioned yet is the issue of a domain being hosted under a multi-site, single code base configuration, which is the case for my wife's site. I am currently on a shared server, which is set to point to my domain name. I have pointed my wife's domain to my nameserver. The issue here is that my wife's site is located under the "sites" folder, which is located in the "web root." So, in this case, I would need to change the name of the subdirectory. What I will probably end up doing, if she does change her domain name, is to also use a rewrite rule in the .htacess file so that a call to her old domain name will still point to the new domain name, since it's paid up for a year anyway and the search engines have already found it. Here is what the rewrite rules look like to direct to http://newdomain.com:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

I have written a bunch of separate statements that can be combined into one using an [OR] operator on the conditions, but that is starting to stretch my understanding of doing things on Apache and I don't want to mislead anyone; I don't know what the [NC] operator does. If anybody would like to comment on how to do it properly using the [OR] syntax, that would be great.

Another thing for you to keep in mind, is that you need to ensure that mod_rewrite.c is installed and that the RewriteEngine is on. Just so you know, a .htaccess file comes with the Drupal install. It should be in your "web root" directory on your web server.

@sendben

Thanks for your response. I've actually got things under control. I have a single install of Drupal, under which I'm running two websites: my own, and my wife's. Everything is working fine. Right now, I am doing all my rewrite work through the .htaccess file that is located in the "web root",i.e. the Drupal install root, which in my case is called /public_html (or www, which is just a mirror). /public_html is what is located under my domain name. So, in effect, my wife's domain is a subdomain of my domain; it just doesn't have to be accessed that way. Nobody has to know any different. They get to my wife's site by typing wifesdomain.com. (If you are curious for the specifics, I can tell you her domain name. I just don't want people to think I am spamming the thread. Obviously, you have visited my user profile to discover my personal website. Thanks for stopping by. I hoped you like it :-)

You are right that I am using cPanel. My webhost allows me to host an unlimited amount of domain names. Mine happens to come for free with my web hosting package. My wife registered hers separately. I did use the addon domain feature.

So, my site runs directly from /public_html. My wife's has her own settings.php located under /public_html/sites/wifesdomain.com.

The point I was trying to make in my original post is that if my wife decides to change domain names, I will need to rename the folder to /public_html/sites/wifesnewdomain.com. Then I would take the wifesdomain.com and use the rewrite condition and rules to point it to wifesnewdomain.com.