Avoid domain forwareding for hosting.

[Geek-9pm]

You can ignore this post if you never do this. 

Recently I wanted to get a new domain and put it on a web host I already have. That host offers a thing called "add-on domain" by using a sub-domain of the host.

Now I am sorry. Later I went and got another service that lets me have real hosting for each domain I own. No more masking a link to a sub domain.

What went wrong? Well, as you might guess, the DNS things is rather slow and you have to wait hours, even days to see it a new host site is up and running. So if something does not work right, you think "Oh, it just takes time to settle the DNS thing." Well, if your stuff makes references to a sub-domain and not the actual domain, things can go real bad.

This is one of those things that most of the time it will work, but sometimes it does not and it is near impossible find an error log to  tells you what went wrong. I found out by typing in a full URL  I knew was right. But the name server was trying to send it to a sub-domain no longer was on the Internet.
Confused? OK, here is an example.

You have two domain, giantbox.co and plaindbox.net and you think you should change giantbox to a US TLD instead of the CO TLD.
Makes sense. But  plaindbox.net   is the actual name of your web space.
Now the hosting service  has given you a sub-domain the is like this:
wvw.giahnbox.co redirects to wvw.giantbox.plainbox.net and in the browser it looks like the real thing. So far so good.
Next you move both domains to another provider that lets you have separate space for each domain, No sharing directories.
After you make the move, yu discover you need to copy some files off of the original giantbox.co site. No problem, it is still there,, so just go there and get the data.
Wrong! yuo moved the plainbox.net site to another server.
So the url  wvw.giantbox.plainbox.net will not be found!

The solution is to reset the nameservers for plainbox.net to what they were before.
As far as cost, there is almost no practical reasons to use domain  redirects unless you really have to do it.
Moral: If you own a number of domains, avoid the temptation to use re direction thinking it somehow makes your work easy. 


{None of the sample URLs are real. }

[DaveLembke]

With godaddy where my domain was through years ago I  had forwarding to my Apache server. Back then I had a server that ran 24/7 in which I hosted Ventrillo ( Voice Communications for friends to use to chat for free ) and my Websites and so it made sense to host my own vs pay monthly fees. The Celeron 500Mhz computer didnt use much electricity and was plenty powerful to host both services. Plus having the full hard drive space in which i had 13GB free of the 20GB hard drive in it, I wasnt squeezed for space, I could host any content I wanted and as much as I wanted without having to buy into more expensive web hosting.

One thing I liked about hosting my own was the control I had in which all my data was right there. Updates to websites were very fast. I didnt have much traffic to my websites. One of them was www.AcesandEights.net for our guild here: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/guild/steamwheedle-cartel/Aces_and_Eights/roster  * But I havent played in almost 2 years. Lots of people quit playing and when less people to play then people jumped ship and went to other guilds. The 3 remaining characters there are all my characters on 2 different accounts. Hosting my own ventrillo allowed connection of 5 people in voice chat which was perfect for most of the stuff we had going on. Had even a voice chat ability to chat password protected with officers to keep some people out of the chat. When troublemakers left guild but wanted to go onto ventrillo and be a pest, I could quickly change the password on my server and let the guild know what the new password was so they could communicate and the idiots get locked out of being able to be pests because they dont have password to connect.

If I bought into Ventrillo hosting through a Ventrillo provider it would be more involved with changing passwords. I did have a paid for Ventrillo account once for up to 25 people to chat through strontium.typefrag, but I did away with that when we only really needed 5 people to be able to voice such as tanks and healers and the dps's could just follow text chat vs voice since that was going on as well.

Godaddy worked out perfect with my Forwarding. Setting it up was very easy.

I guess what should be said is... before you make any changes to switching web hosts or forwarding be sure to have a complete copy of your website locally.

[BC_Programmer]

You want to move wordpress blog www.blog.net to www.blog.com

1. Buy the www.blog.com domain. Don't buy any hosting. You don't need any hosting.
2. Point new Domain at your web host IP.
3. adjust wordpress configuration and change domain base URL setting. from the original domain to refer to the new domain.
4. Let old Domain registration expire.

Thjere is no purchasing of additional webhosting, there is no messing around with subdomains, and you don't need to "copy files"- since there is only one webhost.

Users will still be able to access the same site with the original Domain URLs until it expires. It will automatically change to the new url, and they can access it with the new URL.

[Geek-9pm]

BC_Programmer,
I agree. I should have done it that way.At one-time did that. Should have done it again.  (BTW, is there a HTML method to check and see what URL the user has in his address line?)

Some web web hosts to get you to pay more for having multiple domains .But there are now many, many hosts that will give you what  you want.

I now have a host that lets me add any reasonable number of domains. There is no published limit on disk space and bandwidth. Bit they will let me know if I start using a lot of the server resources.