Parked Domains: What Are They and How Do They Work?

 Thursday, November 18, 2021

Find out what a parked domain is and how it can help your digital strategy by allowing you to use multiple domains.



The parked domains are important to create an efficient and secure digital strategy. They make it possible to use several domains on your website without the need to hire an additional plan for the other domains.

In order to protect the brand or increase the number of visits, it is common to register several domains. But then the question remains about what to do with these domains and especially how to configure them.

Within this subject, it is important to address parked domains and how they can help you manage several different domains within the same hosting service.

Therefore, in this article we'll explain more about parked domains, including their advantages and disadvantages, and also teach you how you can configure it on your hosting service.

What is a Domain?

The domain is a virtual address, that is, a name that identifies your website on the internet. Whenever we type an address into the browser, such as the domain of your website or blog, the browser should return the page corresponding to the address entered.

In other words, we can say that a domain works as a “shortcut” that allows you to access your website more easily, without the need to enter the IP address of the website's server.

Domains are just as important as hosting; these two items are closely linked. While a domain serves as your website's public address, hosting is where your entire website infrastructure is housed, which includes page codes, images, videos, links, installed plugins, among many other things.

Therefore, when we type an address in the browser, several processes happen until you reach your destination, in this case, it is the server where your website is hosted. With this, whenever we look for something on the internet or enter a certain website, your access goes through several other servers, guiding you to the destination server.

And in the case of shared hosting (the most popular on the market), the domain is mandatory because all sites share the same IP. In this way, the only way for the server to locate each client's website is through domain names.

What is a Parked Domain?

Many companies use parked domains as a strategy to protect their brands and ensure greater traffic. In this way, the same company can register similar addresses to prevent other people from doing so and, thus, protect the name related to the main domain.

In fact, two different companies with similar domains can confuse the visitor, making them think a domain belongs to company A, when in fact that address belongs to company B.

To make it easier for you to understand, think of this situation like a teacher doing roll call in Homeroom.  In this case, when the teacher calls out a name similar to yours, you may mistakenly answer the call. Here, in this case, it is no different, visitors to a site may believe that it belongs to a certain company, when in fact it belongs to another.

For this reason, many companies end up registering alternate domains in order to protect a company's trademark. Thus, an alternate domain can be used to direct traffic to the main domain.

Consider the example where you register your company's domain as mylogo.co.za. In order to protect your brand and guarantee visitor traffic, you can also register the domains mylogo.net, mylogo.com such addresses are called domain alternatives or aliases.

Now that we understand a little bit about alternate domains, what are parked domains? Basically, a parked domain is nothing more than an alternate domain, with the same content as the main domain and thus allowing visitors to view the same content (page) on all other registered domains.

By default, when accessing the website mylogo.net and mylogo.com, the address informed by the user is kept, that is, it shows the same content for different domains. This is the role of the parked domain.

However, despite the website hosting maintains the same URL, content managers like WordPress do the redirect, changing the parked domain URL to the main domain URL. This WordPress behavior is to avoid penalties for duplicate content.

Domain Types

Within the subject of domains, we can also talk about the other types of domains, which are:

The Sub-Domains

Unlike a parked domain, a subdomain refers to an extension of the main domain. Thus, a subdomain uses the main domain to make any connection with the server hired for its hosting.

To make it easier to understand how subdomains work, consider the following example. Imagine a situation where there is a registered address on mysite.com. In this same situation, think that you have a blog related to your website, all on the same hosting server, but in different folders.

In this way, you can register a blog.mysite.com subdomain (where the blog is the subdomain) to reference the blog-related folder or forum linked to your main site.

In general, a subdomain just points to an address within a specific directory on your website, be it a specific file, blog, forum, form, among many other possibilities.

But nothing prevents a subdomain from displaying the same content as the main site. It all depends on how the content manager has been configured to display the contents.

Additional Domains

The additional domains are used to access the same hosting service, allowing multiple sites on the same server hosting.

Many hosting services offer the possibility of creating multiple sites (with different content) in the same plan, this is the type of situation that additional domains suit best.

The biggest downside of these domains is the limited computing resources, as the various sites use the same hosting, they also share computing resources.

For this reason, if you want multiple sites with a high amount of access on the same hosting, it is necessary to hire much more robust plans, depending on the number of sites maintained on the same server.

Advantages of Parked Domains

The main advantages of parked domains are:

1. Brand Protection

One of the main reasons that lead people to register other domains is brand protection. Think, you just invented the most creative name for your company, after a year someone registers a domain similar to yours, modifying just a few things would be a very bad situation, wouldn't it?

As in this example, as a form of protection, companies end up registering multiple domains, modifying only the domain length or the order of the names.

In that respect, registering multiple domains and leaving them idle would be a big waste, don't you think? This is where parked domains come in, providing a technique to leverage all domains related to your company to be set up as aliases of the primary domain.

So, in that case, a domain is not useless, and it still ensures that visitors view all website content registered for the main domain.

2. Ease of Access

Another advantage of parked domains is the ease of access. Thus, another widely used strategy is to register alternative domains with the most common typing errors. In this case, even if someone types the wrong address for your company, they will still be able to view your virtual page.

This is one of the most used strategies by several companies on the internet. Want to test this? So, first, try typing www.gogle.com address into your browser, this is one of the most common mistakes made by users looking for Google. Thus, when accessing this page, you will notice that you will still see the original content registered under the domain www.google.com.

3. Phishing Security

Many users may not know this one. These days, many companies suffer from cyber-attacks, among the most common is the Phishing attack. Phishing is a type of hacker attack that aims to trick users through fake pages in order to steal banking details and sensitive information.

In this case, a fake page acts as bait to catch inattentive users and can even target company employees. In the context of Phishing, a hacker can create clones of real pages to pretend to be legitimate.

Most of the time, a Phishing attack can also happen on a legitimate page. After a breach, the hacker can create a redirect, causing those on the hacked page to be redirected to a fake page.

This is one of the most used methods in Phishing attacks. In other cases, hackers just register a domain very similar to your company's and copy all the code from the original site, all this is done to increase the credibility of the fake page.

In Phishing attacks or fake pages, there is a very specific action pattern, attackers often register domains similar to the original to confuse visitors. You can have a website registered to the domain mylogobrand.com and an attacker can create a fake page about the address mylogobrand.net.

In the case of parked domains, as you have registered multiple domains under very similar names, it makes it harder for malicious people to register similar domains to trick your page visitors. So, even if you don't think about it, parked domains end up acting as a countermeasure to attacks of this type.

How to Set Up a Parked Domain

In this topic, we will teach you how you can configure a domain as an alias (parked domain). This can be done directly from your hosting service's control panel.

As companies can provide many different types of control panels, we consider here that they use cPanel, which is currently the most commonly used control panel on hosting platforms.

To set up a parked domain, follow the steps below:

  1. Access the cPanel control panel for your hosting.
  2. In the Domains section, click the Aliases option.
  3. Enter the domain name and then click Add Domain.
  4. Verify that the message was displayed on the screen indicating the success of the operation.


Ready! Your parked domain has been successfully configured. Pretty simple, isn't it? Now, even if a visitor accesses a parked domain (aliases), he will see the same content as his main domain.