SharePoint Vanity URLs

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Sometimes there is a business need to buy a domain like www.x.com, and you need this URL to redirect to a site or sub site in your SharePoint farm. In this scenario you would use "Vanity URLs" which are URLs that just redirect to existing Site Collections. To do this in SharePoint 2010/2013 with either IIS 7 or IIS 8 and either windows server 2008 or 2012 do the following:

Note: the following steps needs to be done on all front end servers,  and also make sure to add it to the DNS.     

    • In IIS go to sites and add new one and enter the site information with the host name for vanity URL
    • in the permissions for the new site add all authenticated users with read permission
    • In IIS section click Authentication enable Windows Authentication till focused on the Windows Authentication in the right pane click Advanced Settings and deselect Enable Kernel-mode authentication.
    • In IIS section, click HTTP Redirect. Check Redirect requests to this destination and enter the redirection information and apply this rule

Now the vanity URL is ready