FAQ Domains & DNS

How to park a domain on your account

Adding a domain to your account without giving it its own website, so it either mirrors your main site or shows a simple holding page.

iFastHosting Support Team Updated 26 August 2026 4 min read Beginner

Parking a domain means adding it to your hosting account without giving it a separate website of its own. A parked domain simply points at the same content as another domain already on your account — usually your main site — so visitors typing the parked domain see exactly what visitors to your primary domain see, without you having to build or manage a second copy of anything.

Why people park a domain

Protecting variations of a name. Registering the .net or a common misspelling of your main .com and parking it stops someone else registering it and using it against you, without the cost of running a full separate site.
Holding a domain before it is ready. A newly registered domain you intend to build a site for eventually can be parked in the meantime rather than left disconnected.
Consolidating brand names. A company with several product names sometimes wants every domain to lead to the same place until each one earns its own dedicated site.

Setting it up

In your control panel, add the domain to your account the same way you would add any domain, then choose to point it at your existing site's content rather than assigning it a separate folder. The exact wording varies between control panels, but the underlying choice is the same: does this domain get its own space, or does it mirror what already exists?

The domain still needs its own DNS pointed correctly

Parking is a hosting-side setting, not a substitute for DNS. The domain's nameservers or A record still need to point at your hosting account before parking has anything to work with — see how to point a domain to your hosting if that has not been done yet.

What visitors actually see

A parked domain typically shows identical content to whichever domain it has been parked against — same pages, same navigation, same everything, just reached through a different name in the address bar. It is not a redirect: the browser's address bar keeps showing the parked domain rather than switching to the main one, which is the key difference from setting up a domain redirect instead.

Parking versus redirecting versus a second site

Option	What the visitor sees in the address bar	Best for
Parking	The parked domain, showing the main site's content	Protecting a name variation without duplicating work
Redirecting	Switches to the destination domain	Retiring an old domain in favour of a new one
A genuine second site	Its own domain, its own separate content	A domain that needs to be its own distinct website

If what you actually want is a second, independent website rather than a mirror of your first, see how to host a second website on one account instead.

Does SSL still work on a parked domain?

It needs its own certificate covering that specific domain name, separately from whatever certificate secures the main site — a certificate issued for one domain does not automatically cover a different domain even if the content behind both is identical. Most control panels can issue this alongside the free SSL already covering your primary domain, without any extra steps beyond adding the domain itself.