redirection.net
Does anybody use them? They supposedly charge 15 buck/year for url registration and redirection (no hosting). I always though domain name registration was at leas $35/year. Anybody got any advice?
Well, my advice would be to put this in the IMHO forum to start with. But that’s just me.
As a user/surfer, I’m always wary about clicking on redirection URLs. My initial reaction is that the site is somehow illicit. This might be part of the atmosphere you want to create. Then again, it might not. I’d never buy anything from a redirected site.
Of course, I’m also wary about snail mail addresses that have a street name, and then a suite number, as I find that this generally means it’s a MBE box.
Lynn: Sorry… guess I should have made myself more clear.
redirection.net doesn’t seem to be like one of the normal whatever.to/mypage -type redirection services. From what I can tell from their site, you basically pay them $15/year to register a domain name (www.mysite.com) with Network Solutions, which they then redirect to the host of your choice (eg, geosh!ttys, tripod, etc). your redirection address is supposedly an actual unique domain name, rather than a directory or subdomain. I just wanted to know if any of y’all have used them, or any similar companies, and what your opinions of the service/drawbacks are.
I’ll hazard a guess and say the reason for the low fee (with a lot of places that offer hosting and DNS reistration, you pay the $35/year to network solutions + a commission to your service + a monthly fee for hosting your page) is that you don’t actually own the domain name: you’re simply renting it from them. Their TOS seem to say that they are under no contractual obligation to actually provide you their service if they get a better offer. They’d be free to sell/rent it to a higher bidder given the opportunity, as the fact that you wanted the name enought to pay for it means that somebody out there might be willing to pay more. In other words, a more cost-effective means of cybersquatting.
Any thoughts? This just seems to be too cheap to be true.
I have some experience with Domain Direct, which costs a little more (and includes a little more in the basic service), but I suppose that it’s similar.
At Domain Direct you own the domain name, and it appears to be the same deal at Redirect. You aren’t paying Network Solutions. There are lots of accredited registrars now (see The Accredited Registrar Directory). There are also resellers that are affiliated with accredited registrars (e.g see OpenSRS). Domain Direct registration is with TUCOWS, and presumably Redirect has some simlar deal.
Technically, Domain Direct works pretty well, and again I presume that Redirect is about the same thing.
In Opera, when you visit a site that is redirected through Domain Direct, you see a white bar at the bottom of the window. This is fixable, I’ve notified them, and they may fix it. (For the technically inclined, DOmain Direct redirects using “<frameset framespacing=“0” border=“0” rows=”,0" frameborder=“no”>"). Redirect uses slightly different code ("<frameset frameborder=0 framespacing=0 border=0 rows="100%," noresize>") which does not show the white bar.
With Domain Direct, you cannot bookmark or link into anything but the home page.
There are some quirks in Domain Direct’s URLKeeper, and probably Redirect’s URL CLoaking is about the same (since they are both using frame-based redirection). You cannot use “target=_top” with a relative link within your site (the link works, but the real URL shows up in the address bar). That is, you can only use “target=_top” with a link to http://www.<domain>.com, where <domain> is your domain. Also, as your visitor wanders your site, the address bar will not change; it will continue to show http://www.<domain>.com.
Me, too.
I registered my site through DirectNIC. Total cost to me: $15 a year. Sweet. Then I registered at Freeservers.com, and while they will give you a free site with 20 MB of space for a banner ad, I decided to take them up on the $6 a month for NO ads and 20 MB deal. I went back to DirectNIC (through their VERY easy modifying option), switched the IP addresses, and 24 hours later had a direct domain (www.MySiteName.com) name for $15 a year and 20 MB of space for $6 a month.
I HIGHLY recommend both of these services. Especially Freeservers. They have this fantastic file managing/ftp system that is ridiculously easy to use, yet complex enough so that you can edit your HTML on the fly, and view the changes with a click of a button. Makes updating the site a million times easier. And compaired to other free sites, like Geocities or what-have-you, their reliability is fantastic. I have NEVER had problems with data not showing up, pictures not loading, etc. that you’ll get with Geocities. Great service site. And I don’t even own stock in it!
Thanks everybody, and sorry for OPing the the wrong board.
From what I gather, redirection.net offers something called “path forwarding,” where the directories in the real url (ie, http://www.geocities.com/blah/blah/blah.html) are instead displayed as directories in your own domain (ie, http://www.mydomain.com/blah/blah/blah.html). I’ve got no idea how that works… I didn’t know there was a way to get around frameset tags like that. Redirection.net’s subdomain redirection service , http://cjb.net, offers the same feature. I’ve used cjb.net in the past, but i’ve never tried that one.
It does appear to work … for example, http://bhsonline.net/ . But most of the sites on their list of examples don’t do it. Interesting.