Question about Domains

[Zifnab]

:/
When purchasing a domain, what exactly does that domain do? To be more specific, if I have a hosted site (for arguments sake, let's call it http://www.geocities.com/mywebsite) and then I puchased http://www.website.com, would the website @ geocities be redirected to that url or what exactly? and if I had a section @ www.geocities.com/mywebsite/crap/index.html, would the URL to it be www.website.com/crap? Sorry but I've always wondered how it works :rolleyes:

[Dr Unne]

*not too sure either* When you buy a domain, you give the domain registrar information of where you want your domain to point and what you want it to do. That information is stored on the central DNS servers or whatever so that anyone who types www.yourdomain.com retrieves the IP info or whatever you gave the registrar and goes to that site. The info you give the registrar can be different things I guess depending on which one you use and what kind of services you get. I used directnic for my domain name and they have an option to set up a redirect, i.e. www.yourdomain.com is a simple redirect that will open a different page in your browser and display the other page's URL and whatnot. I don't think you could say www.yourdomain.com/blah.htm because that file doesn't really exist; the domain isn't really associated with a physical server, it's just a redirect. You can also give the registrar info of the server you're using to host your site, and then have your host's system admins set up the server to use that domain, so that www.yourdomain.com/whatever.htm actually works; the whatever.htm is mapped to some directory and file on your server. That's what "real" sites do I guess, like EoFF. Not all that sure what's involved in getting that kind of thing set up, I've never done it myself, but I really doubt Geocities would do it for you. You'd need to find a better host. All I did for my host was said "Hey I want to have a domain name, here's what it is" and they gave me two IP addresses that I filled into directnic's options / config menu and it magically worked in a few days.

[Zifnab]

I'm not using geocities, I put that as the example, we're actually hosted by zenosaga.com (100 megs on their server) so if we're talking Zenosaga's IP wouldn't that just redirect them to the Zenosaga homepage @ Zenosaga.com rather then our own homepage which is zenosaga.com/~name/namefolder?

[Dr Unne]

If your registrar offers an option to set up a redirect, you can redirect to any URL you want. If you want to do it the real way using nameservers on zenosaga's server, you'll have to ask your server admin to set everything up for you and they'll set your domain to point to your home directory or whatever they/you want. Talk about it with your server admins, they'll know better what they can do / are willing to do.

[Shlup]

For www.DivisionG6.com my boyfriend has it set up so that the URL goes right to his Freeservers.com account. FreeServers.com is free, while GeoCities costs at least $8.95 (U.S.) a month to use your own domain name.

After that the URL changes, but I don't know if that's because you have to do something special for the URL to read things like www.divisiong6.com/main.html or because he only has his splash page on FreeServers.com and the rest of the web page on GeoCities.com.