Rewrite URL www.domain.com causing 404 on my page

Question

Ok so I've rewrited URL in my website, now for some reason, it is throwing 404 error if I type www.domain.com, if I type domian.com, everything works fine.

DirectoryIndex home.php

IndexIgnore *
#RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.+)$ [NC]
#RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/directory/$1 [L,R=301]

RewriteRule ^home/?$   home.php  [NC]
RewriteRule ^about/?$   about.php  [NC]

RewriteRule ^404/?$   404.php  [NC]

ErrorDocument 404 http://domain.com/directory/404

Note: I've commented the 1st 2 rewrite rules as even If I change them it doesn't effect after uploading .htaccess to server, feels like it's cached.

Additional Info, am using <base> tag which is in embeds.php

if($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] == '::1') {
    echo '<base href="http://localhost/projects/directory/" />';
} else {
    echo '<base href="http://domain.com/directory/" />';
}

Directory Structure

Root -
  home.php
  about.php
     -stylesheets
      default.css
     -includes
      embeds.php
  404.php
  .htaccess

embeds.php is included in home.php, about.php etc, and stylesheets, scripts etc, inshort the head section along with <base> tag are in embeds.php

Answer 1

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.domain.com/$1  [QSA,L,R=301]

It should work, if it dosn't it comes from your DNS, or Vhost configuration.

Answer 2

It was also an issue of firefox, which was caching my .htaccess file

Here are some useful links which might help other users referring to this question

Apache - how to disable browser caching while debugging htaccess

htaccess file somehow being cached?