I have a subdoman called, let's say:
cloud.mygizmo.com
But when someone navigates to this URL I want them to actually go to:
11.22.33.44/cloud
Which is on a completely different host from mygizmo.com and can't be moved.
In my .htaccess I have this:
RewriteEngine on
# Use PHP5.4 as default
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php54 .php
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^cloud\.mygizmo\.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.cloud\.mygizmo\.com$
RewriteRule ^/?$ "http\:\/\/11\.22\.33\44\/cloud" [L]
Which does do the redirect, but it still changes the address bar in the user's browser.
How do I make it so that if a user navigates to cloud.mygizmo.com they actually go to 11.22.33.44/cloud but the address bar still says cloud.mygizmo.com?
You can't. Redirection doesn't work like that.
You could proxy the data instead (which would be inefficient and increase your bandwidth costs).
If you have mod_proxy installed, you can use the P flag to reverse proxy on behalf of the browser:
RewriteEngine on
# Use PHP5.4 as default
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php54 .php
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^cloud\.mygizmo\.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.cloud\.mygizmo\.com$
RewriteRule ^/?$ "http\:\/\/11\.22\.33\44\/cloud" [L,P]
You can also reverse proxy using ProxyPass or ProxyPassMatch but those will only work in the vhost/server config.
In the cloud.mygizmo.com/www.cloud.mygizmo.com vhost you can say:
ProxyPass / http://11.22.33.44/cloud
And then any request for the cloud.mygizmo.com gets proxied to the http://11.22.33.44/cloud host.
Note that ProxyPass works like Redirect, it links together the path nodes / and /cloud. So if someone were to go to:
http://cloud.mygizmo.com/foo/bar
They'd get reverse proxied to:
http://11.22.33.44/cloud/foo/bar
If that's not what you want, then use ProxyPassMatch:
ProxyPassMatch ^/$ http://11.22.33.44/cloud
Alternatively, if you want the rewrite rule to behave in the same way, you need to capture the request URI and pass it to the target with a backreference:
RewriteRule ^/?(.*)$ http://11.22.33.44/cloud/$1 [L,P]
probably not the ideal solution, but you could build a page that's pretty much a giant iframe and load the content inside the iframe...
Edit: See if Blue Host allows Parked Domains in your control panel (aka Masked Forward). I think this is what you want.