Domain names are a key component to a web company. Domain names convert the numerical plan that computers use to identify a website into a text based name that is easy for human users to understand and remember.

Parked Domain

A parked domain is a domain that does not have a hosting account associated to it, and also that is usually enabled with URL forwarding capabilities, so that it points to an existing website. For example, please guess that we already run a newsletter that is hosted in any subdirectory of your domain name and that is as follows: "http://www.domain.com/newsletter/homr.html". You may at one given point want to register a separate domain name for your newsletter, so that it is more memorable, but may not want to move its pages to a new server, open a new hosting account, or pay to establish an add-on domain. You can then register and park a new domain for your newsletter (for example: "http://www.newsletter.com"), which will be forwarded to "http://www.domain.com/newsletter/index.html".

You don't need to register this new domain with the same company that hosts your website. You can register it with any domain registrar and point it to the physical location of the pages.

The difference between a parked domain and an add-on domain from a web user's point of view is that with a parked domain the URL in the address bar will change to the physical location of the page as the page loads. For example, if you type "http://www.newsletter.com", that domain won't remain in the browser address bar, but will change to "http://www.domain.com/newsletter/index.html" as soon as the page is displayed. From a webmaster's point of view, the difference is that the parked domain won't have its own separate statistics reported through the control panel of your hosting account.

You may have probably noticed that my newsletter domain "http://www.theinternetdigest.net" is parked and points to the physical location of my newsletter pages, which is "http://www.accordmarketing.com/tid/".

Parked domains are also a good alternative for webmasters whose site is hosted by a free hosting service, since by using a memorable parked domain user won't need to remember the awkward web addresses usually associated with free hosting accounts.