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Does anyone know if it's at all possible (preferably with .htaccess), to send a 404 error code and page when visiting http://www.example.com but have http://example.com working just fine?

I want to 404 the entire www website including the homepage.

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Why would you want to do that when you can just as easily redirect which is better for SEO and usability? – John Conde♦ Oct 22 '12 at 22:50
it is possible with htaccess, but as mentioned, unless you want to punish the user, it's better to just redirect. – PatomaS Oct 23 '12 at 0:17
Yeah, I know it's generally not a good idea, just wanting to run this as a test that's all. – MikeHamster4 Oct 23 '12 at 12:53

2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

Something like this should do the trick:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com [nocase]
RedirectMatch 404 ^(.*)

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up vote -2 down vote

It makes no sense to run a HTTP server on a (v)-host if every request will result in a 404. Why not just fix your DNS setup so that the www subdomain isn't matched by any records? That way, the www variant won't even resolve.

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