What is Alias Domain?

Question

I notice that many hosting providers provide a feature named "Alias Domain".
What it is? and how can it benefit me?

Answer 1

Domain Aliases are domains that are associated with your primary domain. Examples of usage are:

• You have registered ahmed.com you may want to set up a Domain Alias for ahmed.co.uk so that any requests for the .co.uk site are automatically transferred to .com
• They are also useful to redirect users in the event of them misspelling. So you could create a Domain Alias for ahemed.com to redirect user to ahmed.com
• The last common usage is for email domains. If you have two email domains, ahemed.com and myotheremail.com you could alias myotheremail.com so that all email will be delivered to ahmed.com

A live example would be if you entered www.microsft.com in to your browser - this will redirect you to http://www.microsoft.com/en/us/default.aspx

Hope this helps

Answer 2

It's just another way to get to the same physical folder. Say you have domain1.com and domain2.com, and your web hosts stores these in /home/yourname/domain1.com, creating domain2.com as an alias would serve what's in /home/yourname/domain1.com when someone types domain2.com in the browser.

Answer 3

Domain mirroring is a feature that pretty much all web hosts have. It's just not a very useful feature and really isn't even worth mentioning. You'd rarely need or want 2 domains to mirror each other. It's far better for SEO purposes and for usability to just redirect one domain to another to prevent having duplicate content.

I wouldn't base your hosting decision on this feature. Focus on more useful features like SSH/shell access, SFTP, server-side scripting languages (e.g. PHP, Ruby, Python, etc.), crontab access, RDBMS (e.g. MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.), cpanel access, and large storage/bandwidth quotas. Also make sure there aren't any arbitrary limits or fees on mundane features like email accounts/ftp accounts/subdomains/etc