RealNames said:
Chuck, thanks for all your time but I really think there is more to this than you are thinking is possible. It is hard to believe BuyDomains went thru the major expense of setting up 300,000 active domains on their server to do masked forwarding.
As I have tried to explain, once the initial site is set up, there does not HAVE to be ANY additional work per domain.
RealNames said:
I also find it tough to believe the registrars today who offer masked forwarding to customers such as GoDaddy would do all that work, especially since it is often a free service.
I'm quite sure the system used by GoDaddy does not require any work (by a human GoDaddy employee) to forward a new domain. That does not mean they didn't have to do any work up front to set the system up.
RealNames said:
It is a big time intensive and tedious job setting up a domain on a server so it resolves. There are lots of different steps involved including configuring it in the zone files and allocating the server space and default settings, setting up IP's, etc.
How much work is involved in getting a domain name to resolve depends on the techniques you use, but the bottom line is that until the domain name resolves, it will not "go" anywhere. If you find that it is too much work to get a domain name working, you need to either change your method or put a little time into automating the process. If I register a domain using my name servers, it begins to resolve as soon as the registry updates the TLD zone. With zero additional effort on my part, it points to my default web site, which displays a parking page with my default PPC results. Only if I want to change what it does do I need to do anything else, and then I only have to add it to my database with whatever particular options I want to use.
RealNames said:
In regards to some here saying a good way to do masked forwarding is to use just one IP address for multiple names and they will always go into the main website with that IP. That does not seem viable as first of all IP addresses are in very short supply and rationed, most server firms only allow you to have 1 or 2 I.P.'s forcing you to use one IP for multiple names. Often there are hundreds of site using just 1 IP on a server, so getting a different IP for every category or subject website would be almost impossible. You would also need the unique IP for every category of domain names you have using the masked forwarding, perhaps a high number of different I.P.'s.
I have not found any shortage of IP addresses. I have one of the cheapest dedicated server plans available and my ISP provided 5 IP addresses with no justification required. More are available on request if I have need for them (which I don't). If you have a server, you have at least one IP. If you run a web server on that one IP, you can set up one default web site, as well as any number (thousands) of other name-based websites. Any browser request that comes in with no host header, or an unknown host header, will go to the default web site (which could be a static page, a redirect, or a "masked forwarding" frame page). If you use a simple html page, the default page will be the same for all domain names using it. If you use javascript, server-side includes, ASP, CGI, or some other scripting technique you can customize the page based on the name of the domain. If you use a database to store optional information for each domain you can further customize the page, for instance to forward to a different URL or add keywords. In that case you are going to have to add the domain name to the database, either manually or automatically, and enter the specific options.
RealNames said:
Can you please post the 301 htaccess code? Also, can it somehow work without spending vast amounts of time setting up a website for each masked forwarded domain name?
The 301 redirect is a permanent redirect. Any browser or search engine spider that receives it is supposed to change the bookmark, favorites entry, or search engine listing from the URL used to reach the site to the new URL. Whether or not that is a good thing depends on what you are trying to do. If you have 50 domain names listed in search engines, and use 301 redirects to forward them to another website, theoretically after they are visited by the search engine spider they will no longer be listed in the search engine under the original 50 domains. How to do a 301 redirect depends on what kind of web server you run. Since you mention htaccess, I'll assume you run an Apache web server. In that case, one line in the htaccess file will do it:
redirect 301 /
http://www.newdomain.com/newpage.html
But the domains you want to redirect still must point to that htaccess file, which requires name server entry, dns zone configuration, web server configuration, etc. In other words, I don't think 301 redirect is your magic bullet.
You seem to think that because some registrars make it very easy and free to activate a domain name and forward it to a particular destination URL, that you should be able to do the same thing with no effort or expense. It is free and easy at those registrars because they have developed automated software at some considerable effort and expense to make it possible. Connecting a domain name to a web page is not rocket science, and neither is implementing a solution to handle thousands of domain names with a minimum of effort. But both require certain steps to be done, and you can't get around that fact.
