Domain Parking Explained: Free Parking versus Parking with Redirect Print

What domain parking is

Parking is what a domain does with us when it has no hosting plan: it stays registered, managed, and safely held, without a website behind it. Every domain ordered from us without hosting gets parked automatically, so there is never a step to remember, but there are two kinds of parking, and choosing the right one depends entirely on what you want the domain to do in the meantime.

Free parking: holding your ground

Free parking reserves your domain and nothing more. The domain is registered to you, renewable as normal, and sitting safely with us, but it does not point anywhere: no website, no redirection, no email. This is the right fit for:

• Names held for later, a project not yet started, a business name secured before the doors open.
• Defensive registrations, the .com to your .co.za, the common misspelling, the variants you own so nobody else can.
• Domains between lives, an old project wound down, a name you are not ready to release into the wild for the reasons covered in our article on domain expiry and renewal.

It costs nothing beyond the domain's own registration and renewal, ever.

Parking with redirect: a working domain without hosting

Parking with redirect, at a low annual fee that covers the traffic it carries, makes a parked domain actually do things, in two distinct ways:

• Redirection. Visitors to the parked domain are sent to another address of your choosing. This is how a defensive registration earns its keep, yourbusiness.com quietly delivering its visitors to yourbusiness.co.za, and how an old domain forwards its accumulated traffic and bookmarks to a new name after a rebrand.
• Email without hosting. The parked domain can carry the DNS records needed to run Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 on it, the MX, verification, and related records described in our article on DNS record types. If your domain exists mainly for professional email hosted with Google or Microsoft, this is the product built for exactly that: no hosting plan bought for its DNS alone.

Choosing between them in one question

Should anything happen when someone visits the domain or emails it? If no, free parking. If yes, whether that something is a redirect or Workspace and 365 mail, parking with redirect. And the choice is never final: either parking product upgrades to the other, or to full hosting, whenever you are ready, without the domain moving or anything being re-registered, ordering the new service is the whole process.

What parking is not

• Not a website. A parked domain shows no site of yours, if even a single page matters, that is hosting, and our entry plans start small precisely for the one-page stage.
• Not mailboxes with us. Parking carries no cPanel mail service, mailboxes on the domain mean either full hosting with us or the Workspace and 365 route above.
• Not a pause on renewals. A parked domain renews like any other, and expires like any other if it lapses, the timeline in our expiry article applies in full, parked or not.
• Not an add-on to existing hosting. Every domain with us has its own plan, hosting or parking, there are no addon or bundled domains inside another plan. This keeps every domain independently manageable, upgradeable, and transferable without disturbing its neighbours.

Good to know

Parking with redirect is also the graceful way to retire a website without losing what it earned: years of links, bookmarks, and search presence keep delivering people to wherever you have moved on to, for a fraction of what maintaining the old hosting cost. And if you are unsure which product fits a domain you are planning, ask us before ordering, describing what the domain should do is enough for us to point you at the right one.