I'm looking to save some money on annual fees because I have a free hosting plan under one domain. Now, I've parked a new domain that I'd like to use for a site. My main goal is to have the parked domain be the only visible name in the URL, while redirecting traffic behind the scenes to my fully hosted site, which is under a different domain. Is this possible? I'm sorry if I'm not explaining this very well; it's been a long week! Thanks in advance for any help!
3 Answers
Honestly, it sounds tricky. You really want to utilize your free hosting and keep your bills low, but it’s vital to make sure that your hosting provider allows these kinds of setups.
Yes, you can definitely do this! However, you'll need to use domain masking or a "forward with masking" feature rather than a standard redirect. This will keep your parked domain in the URL while showing the content from your hosted site. Just a heads up though, some features might not work correctly with this method, especially SEO stuff. A cleaner approach would be to point your parked domain to your hosting and set it up as an alias so that it serves the site directly under that name. This way, you can keep HTTPS and avoid potential issues.
What you're aiming to achieve isn't a simple redirect—it's actually domain aliasing or reverse proxying. A regular redirect will change the visible URL. To keep the parked domain showing while accessing content from another host, you have a couple of options: 1) Point the parked domain's DNS to a server you control and use it as an alias, or 2) Use a reverse proxy service like Cloudflare or Nginx. Just be cautious, as some free hosting plans might not permit this, and you could run into problems with cookies or auth if the site isn't designed for multiple hostnames.
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