Do it yourself domain parking with Godaddy.com
If your like me, you have bought tons of domain names over the years, and most are just sitting collecting dust. There are many domain parking sites you can use. Some are free (Sedo.com) and some cost money (godaddy cash parking). These are fine but IMO they are very easy to spot and easy to avoid and do not pay all that well. I have read many forums with complaints about the low payments from Sedo and godaddy takes up to 40% of revenue. Last time a looked, Godaddy makes $30k a day with domain parking.
So, how can you do it your self. You’ll be happy to hear that it is very easy and you can do with most hosting accounts. This is also a good example of running many websites from a low fee host that does not allow domain parking.
For example, Godaddy.com has premium hosting accounts that allow you to park additional domains to separate folders. You can have a different website in each folder, but if you have the economy hosting package you can only stack domains to the root directory. This means if your main domain name is aaa.com, and you park bbb.com to root. aaa.com will appear when people go to bbb.com
The solution to this is with a few PHP lines of code, or to use Wordpress MU. I recommend using Wordpress mu because you can set up a community that is is just like, if not better then Wordpress.com. The reason why it can be better is you control the themes and plugins. You can also offer Top Level Domains (TLD) for your community websites and they will still be in the same database. More on this later. For now let’s just learn hot to set up a “Domain Parking Site”.
I will be using the economy hosting package in my godaddy.com account for this example. If you are new to hosting and need a host, please create a hosting account at my hosting company, Opendls.com. Opendls.com is a wildwestdomains.com reseller site and is exactly the same as godaddy.com hosting.
Setup:
My hosting account was set up with aaa.com (example domain)
bbb.com will be parked on aaa.com
First thing to do is get the ip number of the host server. You can either go to your host control panel and get it there, or ping your domain name.The later is much faster…
I’m using XP, so I go to Start > Run. Then type “cmd” to open command window. Then type “ping aaa.com”
You will get a response like so:
Reply from 68.178.254.171: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=54.
68.178.254.171 is your host IP number, You will be pointing all the domains that you want to park to that IP Number.
in this example, bbb.com is registered at godaddy also, so I will be going to the godaddy domain manager in my account to edit the “A” record. You need to set the “Points To” Ip to the hosting Ip that you pinged earlier. To do this, click on the edit button in “Actions”. It’s simple just change the IP from the default value to the new IP. One thing to note is that DNS changes do not happen right away. It will take a while for the changes to take effect. For me, when I make DNS changes, it takes about an hour to start working.
After you make the changes you can either ping bbb.com or keep opening up bbb.com in your web browser and eventually it will open aaa.com.If you see aaa.com you have successfully pointed bbb.com to the right place.
Now we need to add some php so the page they see is bbb.com
make a file in the root directory of you hosting account. Name it “index.php”. Add this one line to it:
<?= $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] ?>
you will see that if you enter aaa.com in the url bar, you will see aaa.com and if you enter bbb.com you will see bbb.com
Very simple and to the point. Now let’s make some different websites. In the same folder as index.php make 2 files, one called aaa.php and the other called bbb.php. Make sure that you make both files look a little different. Make the body bgcolor different in each file so you can see an obvious difference
<html> <title></title> <body bgcolor="CC0000;"> <!-- change bgcolor in both files--> <?= $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] ?> </body> </html>
then in index.php we are going to use a switch case to point to the different files:
<?
switch ($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'])
{
case "aaa.com":
include(aaa.php');
break;
case "bbb.com":
include('bbb.php');
break;
}
?>
That is it, for each new site you would make a different include file. This is a very simple demonstration and just a primer for “real world” examples. Next I will set up a mysql database driven parked site and then a Wordpress MU powered site.
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2 Responses to Do it yourself domain parking with Godaddy.com
NH
how do we setup the database for making a parking site with revenue? - Thx.
admin
NH,
Let me make a short post about this. I have focused a lot on using Wordpress to handle all the databases
