Url Forwarding

[tdhg566]

I'm asking this here even though I already have an account with TCH (account name xxxxxxx*). I couldn't figure out how to get into the members only forum. Frankly, it's confusing to have two userids and passwords for the same hosting service, one to use for account maintenance and the other to use in the forums. But that's just an observation, not my question.

 

BTW, if it's preferred that I use the members only forum, then I guess I need a password?

 

Here's my question. I currently own two domain names (defenbaugh.com and defenbaugh.net) that are hosted by another company. I own them, and I paid the registration with Network Solutions for 9 years (or as many as they would let me). The other company provides me two very, very important services for each name: email forwarding and URL forwarding. I see from your FAQs that TCH does email forwarding, which is critical to my extended family as they move around. So I suspect I'm correct that I can replace this feature by moving my domain names to TCH. I can create kristie@defenbaugh.com, and email to that address will forward to her HAL-PC account, and so on and so forth.

 

What about URL forwarding? Currently http://www.defenbaugh.com is translated by the other company to http://www.hal-pc.org/~tdhg566/, which is where the actual pages for defenbaugh.com reside. I suppose I could move those pages to TCH, but the URL forwarding has served me well over the past few years as I've moved accounts with ISPs.

 

Thoughts/suggestions? TIA

 

George Defenbaugh

 

* Edited by TCH-Raul: I removed your username from your post, for security reasons.

Edited August 11, 2004 by TCH-Raul

[borfast]

Hi George, and welcome to our family!

 

As I added in your post above, I removed your username from your post for security reasons. No one knows which server your account is in, so theoretically no one could access it but just in case...

 

As to your questions, first, regarding the two separate usernames/passwords:

it's just the way things are built, not a choice made by TCH. These forums - running on Invision Power Board - are one product and cPanel (the account control panel each customer has access to) is another. They do not use the same username/password combination because since they're two different products made by different companies, they're not sharing the same user database.

 

I wouldn't expect them to do so, either. cPanel is a very complex product (and IMHO, in some ways, much more than it needs to be) and its makers are probably not interested in getting their hands dirty with all the mess it would be necessary to integrate the two products.

 

Perhaps some day it will eventually happen but I wouldn't count on it

 

As for the next questions, as you already know, TCH does provide e-mail forwarding. You can set it up in your account's cPanel.

 

The URL forwarding is the complicated part. TCH does not offer that service in cPanel but you can probably do that at the domain registrar level or you can set up a small script that will do it for you.

 

A simple example would be to create a file named index.php with the following content:

><?php
header("Location:  http://www.hal-pc.org/~tdhg566/");
?>

and place it in your account's public_html folder. That way, when someone reaches your account at TCH, they will get forwarded to the URL you specify in the script.

 

Humm... not that complicated, after all

 

Hope that helps

Edited August 11, 2004 by TCH-Raul

[tdhg566]

Thanks much. Can we continue this thought, as I have a few more questions:

 

1) How do e-mail traffic, and if we did it, URL forwarding traffic, "count" against my account's monthly bandwidth limits? Do those amounts come out of the same bandwidth bucket as does traffic that originates/terminates on a TCH server? This has some bearing on whether I transfer zero, one or both of my domain names to TCH. I currently have "no limit" e-mail and URL forwarding with the other service. Many extended family members have xyz@defenbaugh.com email addresses, and I don't have clue one how much email traffic they experience (nor do I want to get into that game)

 

2) I very much appreciate you editing my userid out of my message text. But I'm not sure I understand the value of keeping the userid "private", since it appears in the URL that I have posted on the http://www.defenbaugh.com home page that directs people to my photos posted here. Take a look at that page and the link "George's Photo Gallery....". Since ".../~userid" is the standard format for where my stuff is stored, in the absence of a domain name, don't you have to share your userid in your URL with people? Or is the answer that until I layer one of my domain names on top of my TCH account, I'm exposing myself to some element of risk. ?????? If so, then this might motivate me to move my defenbaugh.net account to TCH.

 

3) I looked through your Transfer Domain Name screens, and I'd like a bit of clarification. Will YOU contact Network Solutions and arrange for all the changes to defenbaugh.net if I initiate the transfer? What do you have to do and what do I have to do. Frankly, I do this so seldom that I'm looking for TCH to just "handle it, handle it" (if I do move one of the names).

 

Thanks so much for your help

[borfast]

Well, let's go through your questions one at a time:

 

1 - E-mail traffic depends on where your files are stored and accessed. In the situation I suggested (hosting only a small file at TCH, which redirects visitors to the "real" site on your other account), the only bandwidth used will be for the transfer of that small file. All the remaining files of your site will be transfered from the other server where your site is located, so the bandwidth used will be from that server, not TCH's.

With the lowest account offering 10GB of monthly transfers, you have more than enough to do that.

 

 

2 - Revealing your username is dangerous because from the moment someone knows the domain name of your TCH account, they can try to access your account control panel and brute force their way in, by guessing your password. If they don't know your username, they'd have to guess both the username and the password, which is a lot harder (I'd say impossible).

 

This also applies to accounts outside TCH. Say you ave an account on Geocities, which provides URLs for its users in the form of "geocities.com/userid" (I'm not sure if this is the case but it serves as an example). From that URL anyone knows what your username is and they can try to brute-force the login at the geocities servers. If they'd use an identifier other than the userid for the URL, an attacker could not try to login using that code, because it wouldn't be recognized as a valid userid.

 

The ~userid format is in fact the standard way to refer to user accounts which have no domain name associated and that's what happens here at TCH, too. But I recommend you to have a domain name instead of exposing your username like that, for the reasons I mentioned above.

 

 

3 - Usually, what happens during a domain transfer is that the "receiving" registrar will contact the "losing" registrar and ask them to release the domain to them. The releasing registrar will then proceed to ask their client if the release request is legitimate and if the client responds affirmatively, the two registrars will then proceed to transfer the domain control.

 

So yes, TCH will contact Network Solutions and all you'll have to do is confirm that you want to transfer the domain.

 

If you need to know anything else, just ask

Edited August 12, 2004 by TCH-Raul

[tdhg566]

Thank you very much.