Hosting Types

The hosting type defines the website's behavior. Plesk supports three types of hosting: Website hosting, Forwarding, and No hosting.

Next in this section:

Website Hosting

Forwarding

Domains Without Web Hosting

 
Website Hosting

The Website hosting means that a website is physically located on the server.

For the website hosting type you can specify:

 
Forwarding

You can point one or more registered domain names to the same physical website, by using the domain name forwarding. This allows automatic redirection of visitors from the URL they specify in a browser to a site with a different URL. For example, visitors of the site www.example.com can be redirected to www.somedomain.tld. There are two types of forwarding in Plesk: the standard and frame forwarding.

Standard Forwarding

With the Standard forwarding, users who have been redirected to another URL can see the destination URL in the browser address bar.

Depending on how long you intend to use the redirection, you can select the type of redirection – Moved permanently (code 301) or Moved temporarily (code 302). These are HTTP response codes which Plesk sends to browsers to perform the redirection. From visitors’ point of view, the response code does not matter: in both cases they will be simply redirected to the destination URL. For search engines, the code defines how they should treat the redirected site and affects search engine rankings.

Frame Forwarding

With the Frame forwarding, when visitors are redirected to another site, the address bar of their browsers continues to show the source URL. Thus, visitors remain unaware of the redirection. This is called frame forwarding as the index page of the source site contains a frame with the destination site.

 

 
Domains Without Web Hosting

You can switch off web service and use only email services under that domain (Websites & Domains > domain name > Hosting Settings > the Change link near Hosting Type > the No web hosting option).