Support

The functionality you request exists since about eight years ago. However, whether it's enabled depends on your Apache version and whether your host lets us detect it.

There is a very good reason for it, too. Apache 1.x and 2.0 as well as LiteSpeed do not support status codes in redirects such as [R=301]. If you try to write a .htaccess rule with a redirect status code these versions of Apache will throw a 500 Internal Server Error and your site won't load anymore.

What we do is try to detect the Apache version using the SERVER_SOFTWARE environment variable. If it contains the version as it should e.g. "Apache/2.4.20", we can safely detect the Apache version and enable the redirect HTTP access code feature for Apache 2.4. If the server software string is empty, does not contain a version or indicates it is LiteSpeed we disable this feature.

Please ask your host whether they are using Apache 2.2 or later. If they are not using Apache or they use an older version of Apache you will need to ask them to switch you to Apache 2.2 or later. If they are already using Apache 2.2 or later please ask them to restore the SERVER_SOFTWARE environment variable to its default, including the version number (it can be customised).

Please note that we will not provide a user-accessible control for this feature. Doing that instead of auto-detecting the setting makes it harder for users to successfully set up .htaccess maker. Furthermore and most importantly, search engines no longer care about HTTP 301 vs 302. The only remaining utility of that feature is in the context of HTTP to HTTPS redirection but a. HSTS does it better (and when you enable HSTS we always use HTTP 301 to permanently redirect first time visitors to HTTPS) and b. in a few short years HTTPS will be a requirement, not an afterthought. But I digress. The end result is that after careful consideration I have decided not to add a user accessible toggle switch for R=301 in the .htaccess Maker.