Domain Forwarding

1. What is Domain Forwarding? Domain Forwarding or URL Forwarding allows you to direct your domain name to an existing website or URL. Click here to download the URL Forwarding Form.

2. Why is Domain Forwarding useful? Domain Forwarding is particularly useful if you currently have a website with a long URL address, such as www.internetprovider.com/myhomepage. With forwarding, you could keep your website where it is now and have your new domain name such as www.mysite.com automatically directed to the website. So anyone can type in www.mysite.com in the browser and will be automatically forwarded to www.internetprovider.com/myhomepage. Another common usage for Domain Forwarding is to help increase traffic to your current website. For example, if you had an online grocery store you could purchase multiple domain names and have them forwarded to the same site. www.vegetable.com   www.fish.com www.dairy.net www.candy.com > > > >   www.mygrocerystore.com

3. Can I use Domain Forwarding with my free webhosting account? Yes, this is one of the most common uses for Domain Forwarding. Free web hosting companies such as geocities.com and fortunecity.com offer free web space for users to build their personal websites. A drawback to their free service is that they do not provide you with a domain name but rather an address such as www.geocities.com/nc/siteforbob. With Domain Forwarding you could have www.siteforbob.com automatically directed to your free hosting page.

4. How much is domain forwarding? Namesonic offers Domain Forwarding for only US$10 per year. Click here to download the URL Forwarding Form.

5. What is the difference between Regular Domain Forwarding and Domain Forwarding with Masking? Both forwarding options will direct your domain name to the URL destination of your choice. The only difference between the two is what address the user will see in the location bar of their browser after they have been forwarded. With Regular Domain Forwarding, the actual destination URL will be displayed in the location bar of the web browser. Using the example in question 2, if you type in vegetable.com, you will see mygrocerystore.com on your browser. With Domain Forwarding with Masking, the domain name that is being forwarded will be displayed instead of the destination URL. So if you type in vegetable.com, you will see vegetable.com in the browser search box, instead of mygrocerystore.com.

6. Is Domain Forwarding the same as setting my own Domain Name Server (DNS)? Many people experience some confusion between DNS settings and URL Forwarding settings. These two services - DNS changes and URL forwarding actually serve entirely different purposes. URL forwarding simply takes one URL, such as http://www.mydomainname.com, and forwards it to another URL such as http://www.geocities.com/users/rbrown2323/. DNS settings involve changing the nameserver that contains the IP reference for your domain. For instance, if you have a web page hosted with a hosting company, you will need to point requests for your domain to the hosting company's nameserver (DNS server) so that anyone trying to access yourdomain.com is pointed to the correct IP address (Note: A DNS server is a database used for matching a domain name with the corresponding IP address). It is not possible to set up URL forwarding by setting your DNS to your target URL. But DNS servers must be set correctly for URL forwarding to work. For example, in order for Namesonic URL forwarding to work, you will need to make sure your DNS settings are set to the Namesonic DNS servers, which are NS1.namesonic.net and NS2.namesonic.net.