What is domain parking, and why should you care?
Say you have a great number of domains in your possession, but no websites to link them to. What do you do with all of them?
You park them.
A parked domain is a domain that’s purchased and registered, but not used for any website or email hosting. It’s simply ‘parked’, to use it in the future or to eventually resell. A parked domain might seem useless, but there are very good reasons to keep one.
In this guide, we’ll explain why you would want to keep parked domains, and what a redirect service can do for them. For background on redirect types, see our complete guide to URL redirects.
Why keep a parked domain
So if you don’t want to link a domain with any website right now, what’s the point of owning it? There are several good reasons for keeping a parked domain.
To send users to the same website as a primary domain
A parked domain can serve as a secondary domain to link to a primary domain. The parked domain will be redirected to the primary domain, and display the same website content.
Companies often register multiple domain names that are similar to the primary domain name, to use them as an alias. This is a smart tactic to redirect people that have misremembered or misspelled the domain name.
For instance, the domains redirectpizza.com, redirect-pizza.com, pizzaredirect.com and redirect.new all link to our primary domain, redirect.pizza.
To protect against cybersquatting
There is another important reason to park a domain, especially when it’s similar to your primary domain: it can protect against cybersquatting. Cybersquatters purchase domains that are similar to a business’s primary domain, after which they attempt to sell it back to the business for a lot of money. With every domain alias you connect to your primary domain, you reduce the chance of this happening to you.
To protect a valuable domain name
When starting a business, a fitting domain name can be hard to find, since so many names are already owned by someone else. And purchasing it from a previous owner will be expensive. That’s why it’s smart to secure a domain as soon as you’ve determined the fitting domain name. You can easily park it until your website is ready to launch.
To keep a domain before it expires
You can also simply park a domain when you no longer want to use it for your own website. This prevents other people from using your domain for their website, while you still own it.
What can a redirect service do for parked domains?
Have lots of domains in your possession? Then a redirect service can be especially interesting to you. You can keep a clear overview of all your acquired domains, easily redirect domain aliases to your main website, and make an in-depth analysis of all your traffic. By keeping your domains well connected and monitored, you will be able to build and protect your brand equity.
Park your domains with redirect.pizza
There are many redirect services to choose from. So why choose redirect.pizza?
Easy to use
With redirect.pizza, you can easily import your redirects in one go, and add additional redirects via our easy-to-use interface. See our guide on how to set up a domain redirect in 3 minutes.
Clear overview of all redirects
You will get a clear overview of your added redirects and the incoming hits from the redirects overview page. In just one glance, you will be able to see how all your redirects are doing.
In-depth analysis of traffic
With the analytic tools of redirect.pizza, you can measure all traffic going through your domains. The data includes information about the location, device, referrer and requested pages of your visitors. You can check out what domain is getting the most or least traffic. This will help you make decisions based on actual usage data.
No extra server management
Would you rather not host your parked domains on your own hosting environment due to server management overhead? Our DNS-level approach eliminates the need for web servers entirely. Park all your domains without any extra server management load.
Automatic renewing of SSL certificates
At redirect.pizza, we understand you’d rather not be bothered with renewing SSL certificates. With our automatic HTTPS, we secure all variations of your brand domains automatically. No manual renewals, no expired certificates, no security warnings for your visitors.
