Redirecting and Hosting

The main goal of your domain name is to act as the entrance hall of your website. To achieve this, you have two options: URL forwarding or redirection, and hosting.

URL forwarding is the simplest method. It consists of redirecting visitors who type in your domain name directly towards another site. Note that, in this case, it is the destination site's URL that is displayed in the address bar of the browser instead of the domain name entered.

This redirection service also works for your e-mail. You just need to indicate the address based on your domain name (e.g. webmaster@domainname.com) and the one to which your messages are to be forwarded (e.g. peter@webhost.com).

As for hosting, additional technical details are required. You have to supply the IP addresses of two specific systems: the primary and secondary DNS servers managed by the provider hosting your site.

What exactly are DNS servers? We usually identify computers by using names. But, in order to communicate, computers need numerical addresses. DNS servers are the middlemen that help to resolve names into numerical addresses so that machines can communicate. So your webserver's name needs to be registered with the appropriate DNS servers in order that other machines can connect to your site and visit your pages. Note that the appropriate addresses are supplied by the service that hosts your site.