Re-direct magic...How do they do that?

JDB -

> My latest idea (not original) is to place
> several minisites on the same site using
> re-directs on the default page to send the
> visitor to the right page for a specific
> domain. (Bill Myers had an article about
> this a few weeks back.)

Yup. Dan Butler gave me the same idea. In fact, I've started implementing it with my latest efforts and plan to continue.

> In my research on this I determined that
> GoDaddy.com where I have my domains
> registered can point one or more of my
> domains to my website for $9.95/year/domain.
> For an additional fee they can
> "mask" the re-direct so the
> visitor doesn't know they have been
> redirected to another site.

Here's a free one; www.mydomain.com. That's who I'm using. Seems to be working well so far.

> My question is "how do they do
> that?" I think I understand the
> redirect part, but how do they mask the
> domain name?

I think Jonathan had the right answer. They all seem to work the same from what I understand. Mydomain.com gives you a choice to use "stealth" mode or not. In "stealth" mode, the underlying domain name will *not* appear. For example, my new site 10daystoagreatlife.com is actually hosted at netguerrilla.org/10dayslife/. If I used the "stealth" mode, the netguerrilla.org/10dayslife directory structure would not appear. However, stealth appears to cause issues with secure pages. This is apparently because of the invisible frame redirect as Jonathan points out. Therefore, even though I'm not using secure pages - although I could (my order pages are hosted on 3rd party secure sites), I'm not using stealth mode. The only downside seems to be that the underlying structure will appear once the viewer begins to page around.

Further, I seem to be able to use the redirected domain for setting up such things as the cgi-bin folder that's specific to this domain's reseller program, etc. For example, in the reseller setup, I have the path set to http://www.10daystoagreatlife.com/cgi-bin/signup.cgi, (it's called from an affiliate info page), but the true path is http://www.netguerrilla.org/10dayslife/cgi-bin/signup.cgi. So again. No problem.

Rick Smith, "The Net Guerrilla"


Click Here to See How Domain Redirection Works For Me