How to make your third-party domain name point to your website

It sounds easy right? That’s how I thought when I started my first personal website using the hosting service that came with my Internet Service Provider (ISP) subscriber account. It was basic and gave me very little ability to configure it, but it served my HTML pages very well. My site promotes a new ebook I wrote and wanted a custom domain name so I could direct interested people to “mybookname.com” instead of “myispname.net/mybookname” where my site actually resides. It was actually easy, although there is more to it than one would think. Let me share with you what I have learned.

The domain name provider, NameCheap.com, offers several redirect options, as listed below. All of these options are handled outside of the destination website, so you don’t need to create JavaScript or special page headers in your web pages for them to work.

• url redirection
• frame url
• one direction)
• CNAME (alias, canonical name)
• TXT record
• URL redirection (301)
• YYYY (IPv6)
• NS record
• SRV record

url redirection

This approach is the simplest to understand; is “redirecting” in its crudest form. It means that when a person links to the mybookname.com URL, they will end up at the destination URL (myispname.net/mybookname, for example), and the destination URL will appear in the browser’s address bar. So this is a good way to have www[dot]mybookname.com points to mybookname.com, without the “www”. at first. Of course, this was only a partial solution for me, because I wanted mybookname.com to bring the user to myispname.net/mybookname, and the browser address to still show mybookname.com.

frame url

This is the first option I think of. It seemed to give me what I wanted, albeit with a few exceptions. URL framing is a technique in which the server creates a “wrapper” HTML page with an HTML frame tag that contains the destination page. So when the browser points to mybookname.com, that’s what appears in the browser’s address bar, but the visual part of the web page shows the destination website, myispname.net/mybookname. Looking at the “view source” HTML code from the browser displays the content within the frame. This seemed to give me what I wanted, but it was really a compromise.

One compromise is that some search engines will not dig deeper into the framework and therefore will not select important content that should be searchable. Also, search engines will still select myispname.net/mybookname and present that URL in their search links. That’s not terrible, but it’s not perfect either. People can still access the site, but they won’t see the wanted URL in the address bar of the browser.

Another compromise is that internal links, such as navigation links, point to pages like: myispname.net/mybookname/downloads.HTML instead of mybookname.com/downloads.html. If a user clicks downloads, they are taken to the downloads page, but all they see in the address bar is mybookname.com, not mybookname.com/downloads.html. Again, this isn’t a huge problem, but it does seem a bit unprofessional. People can still get to the content, but in a bit of a flaky way. For the purposes of my web book, this is fine.

one direction)

This method is where you associate the domain name, mybookname.com, with an IP address, such as 198.0.0.56. This would not work for me because myispname.net/mybookname is not its own IP address. It’s an address from the ISP, which routes the request based on what comes after the slash. Also, this would not work well in a dynamic IP situation, or when the ISP decides to change the IP address.

CNAME (canonical name)

CNAME is similar to A, but instead of configuring redirection to a specific IP address, it uses another domain name. So you could configure mybookname.com to go to myispname.net, but not to myispname.net/mybookname. So this would not work for me either.

Others

The rest of the list doesn’t really provide a perfect solution. Given the fact that my web host provides only HTML page services and I have a separate domain name provider, the best I can do is the URL framework approach.

However, there are other options if I want to move my website to another host. Here are some options:

1. Move the site to a hosting service provided by NameCheap for just $2.95 a month I could have a nice configurable website with a direct domain link to my site. This is probably the easiest solution and the URL would work just fine.
2. Use another hosting service for the website and transfer the domain name to that hosting service, which would be done for a nominal fee. This would make the URL work perfectly, as in option 1. Of course, the hosting service would also have to be a domain name provider.
3. Use another fully featured web host and configure NameCheap to use the web host’s nameservers. This would make the URL work just fine, as in option 1. (If my current ISP service already provides this capability, I could use the configuration method below.)

Using an alternative web server

For option 3, the configuration of the web host’s DNS server names on the NameCheap side is done via the “Transfer DNS to Web Host” feature in the NameCheap admin web application. (These configuration features are certainly available from any domain name provider, not just NameCheap.) The web host provides those server names (at least two) on your website. They will look something like “ns1.hostname.com”.

On the web server side, you must specify the domain name for your site when you create it. So, for example, the new site would be mybookname.com. The “www” version of the domain name, www[dot]mybookname.com, it would just stay on the NameCheap side because it already forwards to mybookname.com.

One thing to note is that this approach disables some of NameCheap’s free features, such as email forwarding. This simply means that the email configuration features of the web hosting service would have to be configured on the web hosting side. For example,

</p> <p> info@mybookname.com<br /> would have to be configured on the host side to point (or forward) to the actual email mailbox, like <br /> mybookname@hotmail.com.<br />

Summary

NameCheap.com provides excellent domain name services that allow you the flexibility to start low and grow later. I’m sure other domain name services provide similar features, so you’re not limited to just NameCheap. You can have your cake and eat it too, as the saying goes. All you have to do is make a few simple configuration changes when you move your site to another hosting service, and you’re good to go.