Magento URl Handling?

Question

I have created the new magento site and importing the data from the old site but I have the problem with the URLs. Old site URL starts from www.sitename.com but in my new site it starts from sitename.com without www. Now I am trying to add WWW in my magento site or remove the WWW from the old site through .htaccess file

but the problem is when I change the magento site bse URL to www.sitename.com it is giving server not found error

I have also used the htacess rule to remove the WWW from the old links?

Answer 1

Change the URLs in your DB dump prior to import.

sed -i "s/www.old.com/www.new.com/g" db.sql

Answer 2

After importing the database tables update the values in the core_config_data db table for web/unsecure/base_url and mention the one without www. If your urls are not working without www ie you got error on http://yoursitename.com then upload one test file to confirm that this issue is related to server or not. Also try to delete the contents of var/cache folder. Hope it helps.