If you want to register a domain name to make sure that nobody else is going to take it, however, you haven't developed the web site for it yet, you may park it. This is a feature that registrar companies offer when a domain isn't linked to any web or e mail hosting service. By doing this, you'll be able to protect a brand name, for instance, and you will own the domain in question even though it won't load any content. If you'd like, you can choose some standard template that the registrar provides, like For Sale or Under Construction, or you can direct the domain to a different web address. Your second option is very helpful if you own a few domain names, but you want all of them to open the same site. As an illustration, you could register domain.net and domain.org, then park them and forward them to domain.com. In this example, you are going to need hosting for the third domain name only and the traffic to the other ones is going to be redirected to it.