In last week’s newsletter, I described the process of obtaining your own domain name for yourself or for a genealogy society or family society. In that article, I assumed that you would have your webpages hosted on a commercial service, the same as what most other people do. When using their own domain name, most people pay money to have their webpages hosted on a commercial service. However, this week I will follow up with information on how to host those pages at no cost on RootsWeb, Geocities, Angelfire, or any of the other free webpage services, using your own domain name. Many people do not realize that you can do this and still maintain a unique domain name.

Some things are free, but you always have to pay for the domain registrar’s service. The cheapest registrar I know of is GoDaddy, which charges $8.95 a year for a "barebones" service. Prices from other registrar services vary quite a bit, up to $35.00 a year for some registrars.

Most registrars will only point to webpages that are hosted as "top level pages" on a complete website; they normally will not point to free webpages buried deep inside some other service, such as pages within RootsWeb, GeoCities, Tripod, Angelfire, or AOL personal homepages. When registering a new domain name with most registrars, you have to specify the exact IP address of your hosting company’s DNS servers, which consists of numbers such as 209.197.232.13. You cannot point to a logical name, such as http://www.geocities.com/dick_eastman. In turn, the hosting company’s DNS server has to point to the correct location of your pages as stored on their server. The free services do not point to their pages.

I am aware of at least two registrar companies that are exceptions, however. They are willing to point to the logical name of any webpage anyplace on the Internet, even to pages buried deep inside a free webpage service. These two services do not need cooperating DNS services at the hosting company, and you do not have to specify an IP address such as 209.197.232.13. You can use a logical address to point to your pages, such as http://www.geocities.com/dick_eastman instead.

By using one of these registrar services, you still have to pay money to register your own domain name, such as www.TollerSociety.org, but you can have your pages stored on a free service at no charge or on some other domain name that you already pay for. The result is dramatically lowered cost.

To illustrate how this works, this week I registered a new domain name: EastmanFamily.com. I paid a registrar for the name, but I did not pay any hosting service to set up pages for that domain name. Instead, all requests for that page are redirected to free pages at www.geocities.com/dick_eastman, which I also set up earlier this week. You can look now at www.Eastmanfamily.com and the pages displayed in your browser will actually be retrieved from a subdirectory on GeoCities’ free webpages server. (I just created that domain name earlier this week, so there’s not much information there yet.)

The two registrar services that I have used in the past for redirection services are GoDaddy and MyDomain.com. There may be others as well. They will point your top-level domain name (www.EastmanFamily.com) to any other webpages you desire, even to pages hosted on RootsWeb or in AOL’s personal homepages.

Both GoDaddy and MyDomain.com will also forward e-mail. That is, any e-mail sent to the registered domain such as to richard@eastmanfamily.com can be automatically forwarded to me or to any other e-mail address I choose.

Another feature you will want to think about is "cloaking," or hiding your site’s real address. In normal operation, a person opens a Web browser and enters a Web address, such as www.EastmanFamily.com. The registrar’s service then points the user’s Web browser to the real location of the stored pages. In the simpler method without cloaking, the user’s Web browser will display the desired pages and will show the real URL in the address line, such as: http://hometown.aol.com/someuser/myhomepage/index.html. The user can easily see that he or she has been redirected and can see the actual location of the webpages.

Things work differently when cloaking is turned on. The user enters a Web address, such as www.EastmanFamily.com and then gets directed to the location of the desired webpages. The desired webpages are displayed on the screen, but the user’s Web browser continues to display an address of www.EastmanFamily.com, not the longer, redirected address. The user is fooled and does not know that the pages displayed are actually hosted elsewhere on a free webpage service.

To see cloaking in action, take another look at www.EastmanFamily.com. Your Web browser will not display the true destination address of www.rootsforum.com/EastmanFamily/index.html. All of this is done by a bit of behind the scenes trickery, and the person viewing the page is none the wiser. The sophisticated viewer who knows HTML programming can figure it out easily if he or she wants to check. However, I bet that 99 percent of the viewers will never guess that there is anything unusual going on.

Now click on the link that says "Message Board for Eastman Genealogy Researchers." While this links to a service on still another company’s Web server, you’ll notice the cloaking still shows the URL in the Web browser as being on EastmanFamily.com. The address never changes when going from page to page. The true addresses are "cloaked," or hidden.

You can override cloaking on a link-by-link basis if you want to have real locations displayed. You probably will want to override cloaking for any links that refer to external websites. For instance, go back to www.Eastmanfamily.com and click on "George J. Eastman's Excellent ‘Eastman Genealogy and History’." This time you will notice that the link I created overrides the cloaking, and the true address is displayed in the browser when you go to the referenced page. All of this is under the control of the person making the webpages. (Use target="_parent" on the end of your links to override cloaking.)

MyDomain.com and GoDaddy both offer cloaking as an option although GoDaddy calls it "masking." Same thing.

MyDomain.com will register your domain for $14.95 a year (with a two-year minimum) and then point to any page(s) on the Internet, including free pages. There is no additional charge for cloaking. MyDomain also has a lot of other available free options. Details are available at www.MyDomain.com.

GoDaddy.com at first appears to be cheaper at $8.95 a year for domain registration. However, GoDaddy charges extra for most of the things that MyDomain.com bundles in at no extra charge. For instance, GoDaddy.com charges an extra $5.95 a year for masking (cloaking) and still more money to forward e-mail. MyDomain.com does not charge extra for either of those features. Depending on which options you want, GoDaddy could be either the cheaper or the more expensive of the two. For more information, go to: www.GoDaddy.com.

For my EastmanFamily.com webpages, I wanted cloaking as well as e-mail forwarding. For me, it was cheaper to go with MyDomain.com. I already had the information on a free webpages service, so I was able to create www.EastmanFamily.com for a total cost of only $14.95 a year, which works out to about $1.25 a month. Had I used GoDaddy without cloaking or e-mail forwarding, the total would have been $9.95 a year, which works out to about 75 cents a month.

You can do the same: obtain a domain name for yourself or for your society. Use a registrar who will redirect to any webpages. Place your pages on another website you have access to or on one of the free pages at RootsWeb, GeoCities, Tripod, Angelfire, etc.

Does your society already have pages hosted on RootsWeb or on another free service? If so, for 75 cents to $1.25 a month the society can obtain a unique domain name that points to the pages they already have. The unique domain name will be much easier to remember and to publicize than the longer URL already in use. (Of course, the longer URL will also continue to work.)

To discuss this story further on the message board for newsletter readers, go here.