I notice that many hosting providers provide a feature named "Alias Domain".
What it is? and how can it benefit me?
3 Answers
Domain Aliases are domains that are associated with your primary domain. Examples of usage are:
- You have registered
ahmed.comyou may want to set up a Domain Alias forahmed.co.ukso that any requests for the.co.uksite 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.comto redirect user toahmed.com - The last common usage is for email domains. If you have two email domains,
ahemed.comandmyotheremail.comyou could aliasmyotheremail.comso that all email will be delivered toahmed.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
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I don't think thats a good example... when you entered microsoft.com you actually went to microsoft.com. That's not a good example of Domain Alias. The one of ahmed.com and ahmed.co.uk is in fact a good example– sebastianCommented Oct 23, 2010 at 14:25
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@sebastian - My example is if you enter
microsft.comyou are redirected tomicrosoft.comNote the first one is missing an 'O' This is an example of Domain Alias to cater for misspellings.– BarryCommented Oct 23, 2010 at 14:36
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.
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
