Godaddy hosting and domain - Difference between creating alias and forwarding with masking

Question

I have two godaddy accounts.

In one I have a domain registered and a hosting.

www.mywebsite.com -> Hosted in the same account with Linux+Cpanel

I have another account, and with that account I bought three more domains

www.mywebsite.us, www.mywebsiteusa.com, www.mywebsite.com.co

What I want is to whatever the user types in the address bar it shows the original www.mywebsite.com but the address in the URL bar shouln't not change and should show the .us, .com.co, etc.

I created three aliases with each domain name, then I went to the second acount and change the name servers for those domains to the same of the original website.

I don't know if it's gonna work because it's been like 10 minutes. But whats the difference between doing what I did and just setting the forwarding with masking?

Is there a wrong way of doing it?

Answer 1

When you change the DNS it can take upto 48 hours for the changes to propagate around the internet (ie. a lot longer than 10 minutes!).

However, to speed things up (if you are changing from an existing service), you can reduce the TTL (Time To Live) for these DNS entries to something like 300 seconds (5 mins) a few days before you actually make the change. Then set them back again afterwards (14400 seconds ie. 4 hours is common). The TTL informs how long these entries should be cached.

But whats the difference between doing what I did and just setting the forwarding with masking?

Domain masking is usually when your site is simply contained within an iframe (the size of the viewport) - essentially a 1 page website with an iframe. Yes, the domain does not change in the address bar, but it never even changes when the user navigates around your site. Bad user experience, accessibility (can't bookmark) and bad for SEO.

... change the name servers for those domains to the same of the original website.

Presumably your intention is to conditionally serve different content on these different domains? Otherwise, this is suggesting duplicate content.

Answer 2

You can use frames. It's not best practice, but you can achieve what you want with it. You could also use a Server Alias, but keep in mind that's not the best solution if you care about SEO.