Domain Parking: Definition and Use Cases

What is domain parking?

Registering an Internet domain name without adding any content or connecting it to certains services such as email, is known as domain parking.

This could have been done to conserve the domain name for future use and to guard against cybersquatting.

The domain name registrar or reseller may have access to the domain rather than the final registrant because they will have established name servers for the domain.

There are two types of domain parking: paid and unpaid. In the former, visitors see adverts, and the domain is “monetized.” In the latter case, the registrar or reseller may or may not display an “Under Construction” or a “Coming Soon” sign on the name.

Why park a domain?

If you’re not planning to utilize a domain you purchase, what is the point of owning it? Well, here are a few reasons to own a parked domain:

Save it for later

These days finding a decent name for your brand and then having that name available as a domain is pretty rare. Most of the time you look for a free domain you face one that’s already been bought.

For this reason, many marketers will purchase a domain early in the process, way before the product is available in order to secure the brand’s name and domain. That way marketers can focus on building the product and not have to adapt their name last minute.

Redirect users to a different domain

Parked domains may act as a secondary domain for another primary domain you have in store, by pointing to the relevant IP address of the primary domain.

acting as an alias, a certain company can purchase similar looking names and still have one website serve all the content.

Selling a parked domain

If your domain is valuable it might be worth some money; therefore, instead of letting the website sit there till you find a buyer, park it and earn meanwhile.

Advantages of Domain Parking

The domain is reserved by merely purchasing it and then doing nothing with it, preventing any other parties from doing likewise.

If you don’t park it, the domain will just sit there empty, and if someone were to type it into their browser, they’d get a blank page.

Actually parking the domain provides you additional options and a little bit more control over what is displayed on that page if someone visits your domain.

How to get a parked domain?

The easiest way to start with domain parking is just to head over to any familiar domain registrar, such as Godaddy, NameCheap, Sedo, etc, and register it.

When you’ve got a parked domain you don’t have to take care of nameservers and connect it to hosting. All you need to do is register your domain, that’s it.

Domain Parking Services

Most domain registrars you’re already familiar with (Godaddy, NameCheap, Sedo) provide users with domain parking services.

These services may utilize different ad formats to make the most of your real estate, and the user (you) doesn’t have much control over which ad formats and advertisers will run across your website once it is active.

Godaddy

You can generate a consistent passive income from your parked domains with GoDaddy’s CashParking feature. This is how it goes: Without you having to do a thing, GoDaddy’s advertising partner will position contextually appropriate adverts on your website to convert visitors into paying clients.

The Basic CashParking plan is $3.99 per month on top of what you already pay for your TLDs, while the Premium plan is $10.01 per month and gives you 80% of the earnings from your parked domains as well as a free GoDaddy Auctions subscription.

HostGator

Parking domains on your HostGator account is free if you’re on the Baby plan or higher. The affordable Hatchling shared hosting plan ($2.75 per month) is, therefore not an option, but the Baby plan is only marginally more expensive ($3.95 per month). Additionally, you receive unrestricted storage, unrestricted bandwidth, and a free SSL certificate with the Baby plan.

Dedicated reseller and VPS hosting plans are also available from HostGator if your hosting requirements are more complex than a shared plan can manage.

To guarantee you don’t unintentionally lose any of your domains, HostGator also includes many helpful options with their domain registration services, such as domain lockout and automatic domain renewal. But it will save you $14.95 a year if you want WHOIS privacy protection.

Hostinger

Hostinger is probably the best option if you’re on a limited budget and need hosting and domain registration.

You may purchase hosting from Hostinger for as little as $0.99 per month. The price of their Single plan is that it entitles you to the addition of two parked domains that point to your primary website.

You must at least subscribe to the Premium plan, which costs $2.89 a month and allows you to park up to 100 domains, to add new domains.

Hostinger provides a simple control panel and transfer tool for managing your domains. In addition, they provide WHOIS privacy protection for an extra $5 a year.