Name-forwarding & Web-hosting

spookmeister

I have read quite a bit on these forums about web-hosting but I haven't read too much about owning different domain names and having them forwarded to one address rather than having three or four lots (or six in our case) of webspace.

Can someone tell me a bit more about how I go about sorting this out, what it's called, etc.

You see my mum bought my bro, his wife, my wife, my son, me and herself a domain name each. She's know even less than I do and didn't realise you still needed to have it hosted in webspace owned by some company or other.

I said that I thought you could have all the domain names forwarded to one address that way we could all have our own page/s on the one website.

But what do I look for and how do I arrange it. Is it generally available as part of a package? Is there someone who is doing a good deal at the moment? Is it actually called "forwarding"?

We have all had these names for over a year and done nothing with them (to be honest I completely forgot).

Cheers all,

S.

MercilessKiller

ok first of all lets seperate the 3 things. Domain Names, Web Pages and Forwarding and talk about what they are and mean:

Web Page Hosting - This is a server/storage device which stores your web page. To access this over the network you need to type in the ip address of the server thats hosting it... Don't know what the ip is? Don't worry step 2 helps.

Domain Names - This is the name that can be given to an IP Address. So instead of typing in http://80.125.223.93/ you can use http://www.mysite.com/ for example.. the ip 80.etc is the address of the storage device. The domain mysite.com translates into the ip!

Forwarding - A domain can also be used as a simple forwarding tool. For example, I might want https://www.mercilesskiller.com to forward to https://www.google.com! To do this I would buy the domain mercilesskiller.com and then I would set it up to connect to google.com rather than an ip address where my web page is stored.

Equally you could host a web page.. and then set up several domanis to access that one site. I.e you may have a computer business site and you want several domains such as
https://www.mybusiness.com
https://www.computerbusiness.com
etc.. all to link to the same server...

Hope you understand a bit more about it

EDIT: Just to let you know, some places sell Domain names, and some sell hosting, a lot sell both together... all places that sell domains give you the option to forward the domain to either an ip address of a server (for example the address of a site hosted somewhere else) or forward to another website! Also usually comes with email addresses which can be used as forwards as well

amcluesent

>I said that I thought you could have all the domain names forwarded to one address that way we could all have our own page/s on the one website.<

The company you registered the domain names with will usually offer some admin pages where you can set-up redirection for each domain.

I have web-pages hosted for free on my ISP. These have the usual horrid URL of homepage.ntlworld.com/fred.blogs/. I have two domains registered, and use URL masking so that -

https://www.mysite.com forwards to homepage.ntlworld.com/fred.blogs/mysite &
https://www.myothersite.com forwards to homepage.ntlworld.com/fred.blogs/myothersite

Because I've used URL masking for the forwarding, the URL shown in the browser stays as https://www.mysite.com by using frames. If I used simple URL forwarding, anyone going to https://www.mysite.com would have the ISP URL appear in the browser and give away how cheap I am...

If you pay for proper hosting, the DNS records for the domains you have registered would be set to point directly to the IP address of the hosting service.

Moneymaker

I have a few sites hosted with http://www.betterwebspace.com/Packages.php
Disclaimer: I am NOT on commission or associated with this company in any way. I'm just a user and I love the facilities provided.

The hosting is very cheap, starting with "Easy1" at about £12 a year. That is so affordable that each domain name could be hosted separately. If you contact Keiron (the owner) he can talk you through setting up the domain forwarding to either one site or several.

Please bear in mind that you are effectively *renting* your domain names. You have to pay a renewal fee every year (or less frequently). Make sure you know when renewal is due. Your mum probably paid for 1 or 2 years only.

melipona

So if you can forward several domains to 1 website can you also forward their respective e-mail addresses to one mail manager so that mail sent and received has the right to and from address? Or do you need a separate mail manager for each e-mail address?

MercilessKiller

You can use a forward domain to send and receive yes...

i.e if you have random@forward.com going to mail@mine.com you can send a message from your mine.com account which says its from your forward.com account. You have to set it up in options though

melipona

Not worked it out yet but will play with options again later. Which mail manager are you using? Web based or outlook?

MercilessKiller

I personally always use thunderbird (like outlook but free and better imo!)

Just means infinite space basically (or as much as ur hard drive will handle)

spookmeister

Before I go on thanks to everyone for your comments - I appreciate it.

I already understood fully what Domain Names are and what the differences are between web-hosting and webspace, etc. It's the actual practicalities of trying to get 6 domain names web-forwarded (not name-forwarded as I previously stated) to one web address. I'm still a bit uncertain even now.

Further comments are still appreciated.

The company that my Mum happens to have bought the domain names from appear to amongst the most expensive for web-hosting and curiously they don't appear to offer web-forwarding either. So it would be very pricey to have 6 domains hosted.

amcluesent wrote:

Because I've used URL masking for the forwarding, the URL shown in the browser stays as https://www.mysite.com by using frames. If I used simple URL forwarding, anyone going to https://www.mysite.com would have the ISP URL appear in the browser and give away how cheap I am...

I really like the idea of URL Masking. Could you tell me who you use for this. Since learning of this I have been reading that there are some pros and cons.

Pros - Can be seriously cheaper than other methods.

Cons - Not all URL Masking allows search engines to "see" your website and also if you have a site (rather than a page) regardless of which page your visitors navigate to they will only ever see "https://www.mysite.com". Again I realise that some places do offer better URL Masking than others like just-the-name.co.uk

Who is generally considered "best value"?

As I said earlier all I'm after is web-hosting at a reasonable price that allows 5/6 domain names to be web-forwarded.

Thanks again.

S.

MercilessKiller

you could always create sub domain forwards and then put your links in ur main web page to the masking sub domains.. if that makes sense

so.. https://www.mysite.com links to https://www.isp.watever.com
then in mysite.com user can click photo's... instead of it going to isp.watever.com/photo's, you set up another mask for mysite.com/photo's to go to isp.watever.com/photo's and then link ur page to the mask version

spookmeister

Hi thanks for all your input. I don't entirely understand what you're saying in your last post on this subject.

S.