Domain Forwarding - 2 ways of doing it
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2005-11-29 08:53:17 - Graham EllisIt's always seemed to be a real hassle to move domains and DNS service from one ISP to another, and I think that's partly because the ISP that you're leaving might not want to loose business, and partly because of necessary security checks to avoid domains being stolen. But it's lead us to some interesting situations / setups in the last couple of years.
If you visit our Opentalk domain, you'll be taken to a DNS server in Germany that resolves to a web server with the same ISP, also in Germany. Visit pages on the domain, and the server in Germany will forward the request and grab the content from another server that we run - with a different ISP - in the USA. This is known as Web Forwarding and can work reasonably well; on the down side, it can be a bit slow and the forwarding host may wrap the content in frames which mean that you can't bookmark / see the URL of individual pages.
Better than Web Forwarding is DNS Forwarding, where a DNS server in one part of the world points directly to a host computer in another. Our wellho.co.uk domain works like this; The DNS server that you'll go to if you visit the site is located (I think) in the UK, but that returns the IP address of another server, again in the USA. Access to pages on the web site then bypasses the UK system making for faster access, and bookmarkable pages without frames.