Domain name forwarding
What is it?
Domain name forwarding is when a request for a web address is forwarded to another web page, a simple example is as follows:
http://spacereg.com/ is forwarded to http://www.spacereg.com/.
Using this service you can use your new domain name to send surfers to a website you have already created, possibly on a free hosting site such as Geocities, for example:
http://www.yourdomain.com/ could be forwarded to http://www.geocities.com/your_free_site/page.html.
Another example would be if you had a free blog setup, such as the this webmaster blog. Then you could create the following forwarding rule:
http://www.yourdomain.com/ could be forwarded to http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/.
For each domain name you can setup an arbitrary number of rules, each rule relating to a hostname that is a subdomain of the domain name registered, for example you could setup the following 2 rules:
1. http://www.spacereg.com/ forwarded to http://spacereg.com/.
2. http://payment.spacereg.com/ forwarded to http://www.spacereg.com/contact.html.
How do I use it
In order to use our domain name forwarding service you will have to register or transfer your domain name to SpaceReg. Once your domain is registered with us, setting up forwarding is simple:
- Login to our members area.
- Click on view/configure your domains.
- Select the domain you wish to use and click on its domain forwarding link.
- If your domain name is not using our authoritative name servers, then you will have to update the authoritative DNS servers via the link provided to activate forwarding.
- Fill in the add/modify domain forwarding form, choosing a valid URL to be forwarded to and the domain name forwarding type and click on activate.
Domain name forwarding changes are instantaneous unless a change of authoritative name servers is required, in this case it will take as long as a change of authoritative name servers. If you change the domains authority away from SpaceReg our servers will still follow your domain name forwarding rules for as long as they receive HTTP requests.
It is possible to use domain name forwarding to achieve seemless hosting service changes. Ask your hosting service providers (old and new) to give you alternative URLs for your site. Then proceed as follows:
- Activate domain name forwarding and add a rule to forward to the alternative URL for the old service.
- Wait for the domain name DNS authority to move to our servers.
- When you are ready to move hosting service provider, simply change the forwarding rule to point to the alternative URL for the new service.
- Update the domain name DNS authority to that of your new hosting provider.
Since domain name forwarding changes are instant once SpaceReg is the domain name DNS authority for a domain the change of hosting service will be quick and seemless.
A valid URL has the form:
[protocol]://[host name]:[port number]/[object path]
The protocol is required and can be either http or https. The host name is required. The port number is optional and if omitted the preceeding colon (:) should be omitted. The object path is optional, however the preceeding forward slash (/) is not. The following are valid URLs:
- http://spacereg.com/
- http://spacereg.com:80/
- https://www.spacereg.com/
The following are invalid URLs:
- www.spacereg.com
- http://spacereg.com
There are two types of domain name forwarding implemented on SpaceReg. Normal forwarding is a simple URI redirect implemented with an HTTP 403 status code, this causes your browser to reload the page and the new URL will appear in your browsers URL text field. Stealthy forwarding is implemented with an HTML FRAMESET and will cause your browser to open the new URL in a frame, this has the effect of keeping the original URL in your browsers URL text field. Stealthy forwarding is also sometimes called domain name cloaking or framing.
Important considerations
Domain name forwarding can only be performed if your domain name uses our authoritative DNS servers. Changing your domains authoritative DNS servers will have the effect of deactivating all the domain name forwarding rules you have setup for that domain.
| 
| Account | Help |