Ready to purchase a Home Domain

[hcfwesker]

Ok. i could've searched for similar topics ... but mine's pretty simple and basic.

I'm ready to buy a home domain name for my forum ... i just need to know a few things.

can i JUST purchase a blahblah.com name to redirect the link to my forum

or do i have to buy the domain with the domain name,

also ... yes, i'm on the ever so craptastic that is known as proboards ... can i link my forum from this homepage, if it is necessary that i have to purchase.

I am actually interested in the homepage domain hosting thing ... any suggestions which are good, but not too expensive?

thanx for your help, and hope i explained everything ok ...

 

[Dj-Whitey]

ok. If your free forum let you add a redirect domain name then yes you can.

If not your looking at the other option
edit. if your after cheap web hosting I know where to get it.

www.cove.com.au/hosting.
look around with the plans they have

 

[ℓєσ gнσѕт]

Let me clear it up, you dont have to have a homepage with a domain name. Chances are, if you buy paid hosting, it will come with a domain name, yes. However, if you dont see the need for a homepage, or the ability to host anything else, dont buy hosting. Instead, use godaddy or another domain service, and redirect the domain to your forum. If you look around ProBoards support, im sure they can let you know the nameservers, or the best way to use a domain with your forum.

As for the "homepage domain hosting thing", if im reading that correctly, you are interested in buying paid hosting so that you can setup a homepage, as well as anything else you would like. In this case, youd buy hosting, and point the domain records to that service, and create a defult.html page on your account. From there you could make a subdomain of forum.site.com and redirect it to the forum if you wanted.

Some good cheap hosting would be BlueHost.com, and it comes with a free for life domain name as well. It costed me $160 for two years of hosting, which I think is a rather good deal for their support and such.

 

[Ascent]

I suggest the following domain registars:

-NameCheap
-GoDaddy
-Name.com
-Moniker
-Fabulous

 

[Dj-Whitey]

also cove.com.au

 

[DSi]

I think what you would want is called a "soft redirect." With a soft redirect, someone would go to http://www.brawldomain.com (or whatever domain you buy) and it would just go right to your proboards forum. Once there, the url in the address bar will still be your proboards forum domain.

Or, you could have a "masked redirect." With a masked redirect, someone would go to http://www.brawldomain.com and it would go to your forum, and the url in the address bar would be http://www.brawldomain.com. However, when someone goes to a post, or a different section, the url won't change; it will always say just "www.brawldomain.com."

What I think is the best, but also the most complicated and hardest to set up is a nameserver change. With this, you would buy http://www.brawldomain.com, and it would go to your forum. The url in the address bar will be http://www.brawldomain.com, but it is better than a masked domain; for example, http://www.brawldomain.com/yourtopic.html will be the same as http://www.hcfwesker.proboards62.com/yourtopic.html
If you're still not clear on a nameserver change, take a look at my forum. The original URL is http://24.myfreeforum.net but with my nameserver change, http://24forum.net has all of the same pages and information. The only catch is you would have to contact proboards staff and ask them to help you out with the nameserver changes, and then you would edit the nameservers on your domain, which really isn't too hard to do.

I recommend using http://godaddy.com to buy your domain. They are the cheapest and you can do all 3 of the methods I explained above with GoDaddy. They are who I use for my forum.

 

[hcfwesker]

well, DSi, you already know what i'm looking for, and thanx for the info .. the one catch is i think proboards doesn't allow actual url name changes, cause it helps advertise their boards with the name in the url .. somethimng like that.

i'll still get the soft redirect link... and check on goDaddy

thanx everyone for the help, also.

 

[Ascent]

You've never bought a domain before?

 

[hcfwesker]

I've always had the money, but just something i wasn't interested in, until DSi ran it by me.

mainly just looking for the domain name change ... for redirecting purposes, that's all

 

[MrJohn]

Yea best thing would be to just buy the domain name, not the space. Then just redirect it to your forum. Way cheaper. -😉-

 

[hcfwesker]

Well, i DID it!!! than you everyone for the help. instead of redirecting the domain name to my forum ... i paid $12 to PB Support, and they have change my forum's url to

http://www.brawldomain.com

very happy about this 🙂

 

[CyberFreak]

Good work... It does make the forum look more professional with a TLD -🙂-