What is Domain Parking?

To park a domain means you put it on hold. It’s like you get a domain name, but you don’t relate it with services (web hosting, email). You park it to use it later, so it just shows a landing or holding page on it. Commonly, it displays a message that can be your contact info or a specific reason for the domain to be parked, “under construction”.

Why use domain parking?

There are different reasons to consider this practice.

  1. Under development. You have a full-time job, but you get a great idea for an online business. You can’t dedicate all day to its development, but you don’t want to lose the domain name you already thought. What many people do is they buy the domain to reserve the name, and it gets parked to use later, when it’s ready. 
  1. Selling domains. It can happen that you only invested in buying the domain. You think you own an attractive domain name that potentially can be interesting for others. You park it, waiting for the right client to appear and pay you to get it.

This has become a profitable activity called domain flipping. Investors don’t buy one or five, but many different domain names to have a vast portfolio to offer to potential clients. So the only info they publish on every domain’s landing page is their contact data. 

  1. Prevention of cybercrimes. Domain squatting or phishing are common crimes that shady people practice through domains that use well known, trustable trademarks to abuse users. First, squatters know that no respected brand owner wants users to type their brand to finish in a strange website. So they try to sell those domains to the brand owner in really high amounts of money. Phishing works registering a domain with the name of a reputable brand. Then a copy of the official website is built there. Users are driven to the fake site, usually via active links attached in emails, for criminal purposes.

As a security measure, big companies register their brands with different TLDs (.com, .co, .net, .org, .de, .mx, etc.) to narrow criminals’ possibilities of registering alternative domains to cheat people. Once registered, the domains get parked.

  1. Publishing ads to get profit. Maybe you have experienced typing the website’s domain name, just to finish in a landing page full of different ads waiting for you to click them.

There are services that enable users to build an HTML page, with a parked domain to insert ads. It’s not a full website, just a page that generates passive income for the owner through the ad clicks.

  1. Domain expiration date. Sometimes domains get parked because owners are not using them anymore. Their hosting provider contracts are expired already, but domain names not yet.

This could be an opportunity if you are interested in the domain name. Maybe you just need to wait for it to expire. If the current owner doesn’t renew the registration, it could be yours without paying for it.

How to park a domain?

It’s easy, but it costs. You just choose the domain name you are interested in. If it’s available, you register it -through a domain registrar- and it’s yours.

You have to pay for the domain. To keep it, you have to renew the register yearly. Only owning it, you can keep it parked.

Then, using the control panel of the domain registrar, you can find the feature called “Domain Parking,” activate it, and fill in your information. 

Conclusion

Domain parking is a basic but useful feature, and it’s proof that depending on your personal and economic expectations, a single static page could be an opportunity profitable enough.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *