Tip about domain parking
When you buy a domain before you're ready to setup the website, the domain registrar will happily offer to park it for you. They'll show a big “This site is coming soon” sign and probably throw a few ads up on the page to make some money while you get your act together. Then, when you finally get the hosting for your site organized you just go to the registrar and tell it to use the hosting service's nameservers to handle your site. You domain will now go to the hosting service, which will serve up your brand new spanking website.
Or not. What if your ISP's domain name cache (a cache stores frequently-looked-up information locally to save on Internet bandwidth) doesn't refresh itself very often? Then you end up like me, stuck with a browser that continues to insist on showing your registrar's “coming soon” page instead of the new site you just spent hours crafting! Argh!
There is a workaround if you know the IP address for your hosting service. (Ask them, if you have to.) Just put an entry in your hosts file to force your computer to bypass the ISP's name servers and resolve your domain name directly to your hosting service.
My tip: get the hosting service settled on first. Even if you don't have a site yet, when you register the domain point it at your hosting service's name servers. It'll save you a small amount of grief.
Or get a better ISP!
Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.
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One Response to “Tip about domain parking”
Oddly enough I just transferred a domain that I sold when I read this. I manage my DNS so I started prep by reducing the cache time down to an hour for my name servers. Everything checked out ok. Then as we got close I reduced down to 5 minutes and found out - my ISP won’t honor that! So they defaulted to 48 hours! Now anyone on my ISP has to wait 48 hours.
I guess the lesson learned for me is don’t go to less than an hour on the nameservers
And the hosts file idea works great to bypass your ISP. If you run your own server or cache at home (like for a multi-site development environment) you can also declare anything as a private domain and point it in the right direction as well. This also works great (but overly complicated) to point one or two obnoxious pop-up domains into the ether for your whole network.