Forwarding my domain to my website at a new host

Murmansk

Following on from another thread on here recently I'm now pondering the matter of forwarding my domain name to my website at another host.

When I had the site at Wix I just forwarded the domain name to the rather unfriendly address on Wix of the site and that seemed to work.

But when I've looked at the Help files on more than one host it seems to say that I need to do some rather more complex stuff in order to link my domain to my site and I'm wondering what are the advantages of doing it this way rather than the seemingly-simple way I've been doing it up to now?

droopsnoot

Are you wanting to "forward" the domain (so it goes to one site, and then forwards to the actual site), or just set up the domain DNS records to point directly to your new host?

I recently changed hosting company, and all I needed to do was to tell the host about my domain (so that their servers knew where to send requests for that domain), and to go into my domain control panel (at the separate company where the domain is registered) and set the name servers to be those of my new host. Any request for my domain then knows to look at the DNS servers owned by my hosting company, and they will point requests to the actual server.

Murmansk

Thanks for your reply

What you describe as having done is the more complex option to which I refer, in contrast what I have been doing for the past five years is just going to the website where I obtained my domain name and going into the settings there to enter the actual address (a bit unfriendly) of my website on Wix and I selected "masked forwarding" (I think it was called or cloaked) with the result that anyone going to my domain address gets to see the Wix website just as I wanted and to them they were looking at www.mywbsite.co.uk on their address bar and not www.unfriendlywixsite.co.uk

So the essence of my question is why not keep on doing it my way rather than your way? What are the advantages of your way as it sounds a bit more complex - but it may well be better in some way?

DullGreyGuy

When a user clicks on a link, say the ContactUs page what then shows in their address bar?

1. www.mywebsite.co.uk
2. www.mywebsite.co.uk/contactus
3. www.unfriendlywixsite.co.uk/contactus

Who did you buy your domain name from? Presumably it's them that you have setup your masked/cloaked forwarding?


Haven't done web dev for many years but back in my day the answer would have been 1 which generally meant your actual homepage was a more or less blank webpage with an iframe taking up the whole content and loading your other website in it. This had a few consequences:

1. people (inc you) couldn't link to anything other than the home page without using the unfriendlywixsite address

2. Search engines wouldn't index deeper pages under your URL but may be indexing them under the unfriendlywixsite address

3. Search engines could penalise you thinking you were just stealing someone else's content 

4. its just a more professional approach to setup the name servers or DNS correctly rather than wrap your site inside another

Things have moved on since my day, you can give Google more information on what to index and not, it maybe the answer is now 2 not 1 and so that fixes the first two problems.

Murmansk

Thanks very much for taking the trouble to give such a comprehensive - and comprehensible - reply! 

I'll take a look at the points you raise but given that Mr Google seems to be having some problems with my current setup I think it'd be wise to spend a few quid and get it set up in the best way.