*Best* way to forward/redirect a commonly mis-typed domain name

Question

You own thecheesecakefactory.com and your site lives there. You know that many of your visitors will simply type cheesecakefactory.com into their browser, so you purchase that domain as well.

What is the cleanest way of handling the redirection. I know GoDaddy offers a "domain forwarding" service but I am not sure if this is the "proper" way of handling it, and I don't necessarily like the idea of GoDaddy handling my DNS.

My other option would be sending the domain to my DNS servers and possibly my actual server. Is it possible to do this without setting up a new vhost and a 301 redirect on my server (using DNS only)? If not, how does the GoDaddy forwarding service work?

Update: Solution Below

This is not possible with a CNAME record only (see the chosen answer), it needs to be done on the server level. I ended up implementing a catch-all vhost on my server and pointing the new domain to my server with a simple A record. Here is what I used for a vhost:

<VirtualHost *:80>

    # Catch all

    DocumentRoot /var/www
    ServerName cheesecakefactory.com
    ServerAlias cheesecakefactory.com www.cheesecakefactory.com

    # Re-direct

    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteRule .* http://thecheesecakefactory.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301]

</VirtualHost>

Answer 1

You use a CNAME record. How you set that up varies depending on what you're using for DNS.

EDIT: If you want to use the webserver to accomplish this (as in the other answer) I'd still recommend against using mod_rewrite. mod_alias is much simpler to setup and use, and more clearly expresses your intent. You'd put this in your .htaccess file:

redirect 301 http://thenameyouwant.com

Answer 2

You can not handle this in DNS alone

The redirection has to be handled by the HTTP response. So you will need to configure both DNS and your webserver.

You can set up domain alias's (as in Bill's answer) using CNAMES, but that just means both urls will point to the same server. Both urls will serve up the same content. For SEO reasons this is bad, duplicate content adds to your sites spammy factor.

The proper way to handle this is to setup the CNAME alias so that both urls point to the same server. Once you have that use URL rewriting to ensure all the content is served from the same domain consistently.

To do that use Url rewriting. see apache mod_rewrite or Helicon IIS Rewrite.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain\.com 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ [domain.com...] [R=permanent,L]