Hosted Domain Services

What is domain forwarding?

Our domain forwarding service allows you to redirect your domain name to another URL. Once the domain redirect is in place, internet users typing your domain name in their browser address bars will be forwarded by our servers to wherever your website is hosted.

A domain redirect will only work as long as your domain name is connected to our forwarding servers. If your domain name has expired, the redirect will no longer be active.

What types of redirects are available?

You can configure 3 different domain redirects:

301 or 302 redirect (unmasked)

It is the best way to implement a search engine-friendly domain redirect.

Users will be redirected to the URL of your choice. Your original domain name will not appear in their browser address bars. Instead, browser address bars will display the target URL, i.e the URL users are being redirected to.

301 redirect
302 redirect

URL Frame, also known as URL masking (masked)

This type of redirect is not recommended, as it will affect Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Users will be redirected to the URL of your choice. Your original domain name will be the only one to appear in their browser address bars. This is made possible by the contents of your website being encapsulated in a frame; hence the name.

Use cases

example of a 301 redirect

301 redirect (permanent and unmasked):

mytest.com redirects to mytest.net.

Google will no longer consider mytest.com as a valid URL and mytest.net will appear in the search results instead of mytest.com. But mytest.com will pass on link equity to mytest.net, which will of course benefit your website’s SEO.

302 redirect (temporary and unmasked):

mytest.com redirects to mytest.net.

302 redirects are useful in some cases: if your content is temporarily inaccessible or if you want to redirect users according to their language, for example. Google will continue to consider mytest.com as a valid URL

example of a 302 redirect