Last update: 6/9/01; 19:42:26.
Thoughts and ideas as they occur to me.
Saturday, November 18, 2000
Free Website and Email Redirection. Last week, I had an interesting experience and decided you might like to know what I learned. I've been working on a website for Appalachian Heritage Crafters, a non-profit cooperative in Murphy, North Carolina. When we first started, we had very little money to work with, so I've been finding as many free services as possible.
We started with a free business account at Hypermart.net (http://ahcwnc.hypermart.net). This has been working well. I didn't want to put too much development work into the site until we decided upon our domains and secured them. So, when we chose to use ahccrafts.com and ahccrafts.org, I went to 000domains (http://000domains.com) where I registered each domain for one year at $13.50 each. This is the fifth and sixth domain I've registered, or helped register, with their service and I recommend them highly. They have the best price I've found and excellent customer service both times I've asked a question.
I set up ahccrafts.com and moved it to point to ahcwnc.hypermart.net. This went well and the transfer was completed in just a few days. Then I ran into a bit of a problem. Hypermart could only support a single domain name for this virtual domain. What was I going to do about ahccrafts.org?
I turned to the tech support at 000domains.com, and he recommended a service at mydomain.com (http://mydomain.com). They offer free dns services, or the more simple email and website redirection.
Within minutes, I was able to register a free account, and redirect http://ahccrafts.org to point to http://ahccrafts.com. Then, in fifteen minutes or so, I set up about a dozen email addresses for ahccrafts.org and pointed them to equivalent addresses at ahccrafts.com.
Upon paying for ad-free hosting at Hypermart.net ($99.00 per year), I had access to their advanced email aliasing. I set up the dozen or so email addresses there and pointed them to the individuals who would receive email from each address. This took about half-an-hour.
The result, after waiting a few days for the new addresses to propagate across the Internet, is that anyone can now type in http://ahccrafts.org or http://ahccrafts.com and get to our website.
You can also send an email to president@ahccrafts.org or president@ahccrafts.com and I'll get the message (at least until the end of the year when someone else becomes president).
Setting up multiple domains and email aliases on a computer that has a full-time connection to the Internet isn't horribly difficult, but I found using mydomain.com to do the redirection of our second (and possibly other future) domains to our virtual domain at Hypermart to be very easy. I'm very pleased with their service.
Mydomain.com does not offer website hosting, but they're an ideal choice if you want to redirect multiple domains to a single site that doesn't support multiple domain hosting. And, again, it's free.
Although I haven't tried it, you should also be able to move a domain to them and use it to point to other sites that don't host domain names.
I recommend Hypermart.net, 000domains.com, and mydomain.com, and I'll use their services as I need them in the future.
(Now I have to get to work developing that website so we can sell quality hand-made arts and crafts to fine folks all around the known universe! [grin])
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© Copyright 2001 John L. Dilbeck, jd@johndilbeck.com.