hello. i just taught myself some basic HTML & built a simple website. im on a friends family's server & so it's free for me. however, i want to have a different web address than what they gave me. i want to buy a new domain name, but i don't want to buy one unless i can have the new name link to the contents of the old name. i don't want the old domain name to be visible at all either. is this possible?

i found something online that looks like what i want, but i'm not sure:
domainredirect.com/domainredirection/

any help would be much appreciated. thankyou, tom
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Hi Madness, welcome to the tech forums.

I'm not a fan of these kinds of services, mainly because it's very hard to know what you are actually getting.

For example, on the service you cited:


This package leads me to believe that what they are doing is actually placing your site into a framed page on their servers, that's how registrars like godaddy.com do it too. That's pretty much useless from my experience.

If the above service does what I think they do, search engines would probably not find or list your content correctly.

Setup a real site on the server using virtual hosting
If the computer that is currently hosting your site is running Apache web server, ideally on unix or Linux, but Windows is ok too, you can create an .htaccess file that redirects all requests for your real domain name to the folder on that site that contains your real site.

You'll need to find out which webserver they are running before you make any decision. We don't deal with any IIS related issues at all here, but are happy to help with Apache questions.

We tend to shy away from this kind of thing, however, it's much better to just bite the bullet and buy a real webhosting package, or to have your friends set up a virtual account on their server, which is not particularly hard if they know what they are doing, either IIS or Apache support running multiple sites fine, that's how almost all shared webhosting works.

Once this account is setup, you simply point the domain name you bought at the server IP address, and the server assigns that request to the correct folder on the server computer.

Good hosting options
You can get a basic beginners hosting package from pair.com for only $10 a month, which isn't very much money. There are cheaper deals available if you look, but generally you sacrifice service or quality on those, so we don't deal with them as a rule.

That would be a far preferable option in my opinion, that way you have a real website.

Domain name registration
You can get a pretty decent deal on a domain name from pairnic.com, there are cheaper services, but, again, you get what you pay for, plus usually you get the added bonus of bad service, missing services, etc, and various headaches you didn't expect when you go for the real cheapos.
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thankyou very much for your help.
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If you ever have any basic HTML/CSS type questions feel free to post them in the HTML forum.

Hope this was enough information for you to help you make an informed decision. Our experience with things that seem like they are really easy or convenient is that they aren't, and cause more problems than they solve. Sometimes they work ok, some domain name forwarding works fine, but it's been so long since I've used a service like that I can't say which ones are actually good or bad any more.
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