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. }