It can be tricky with these "free domain with hosting" offers, as to who the real owner actually is. With a reputable host the domain will be in your name and you should be able to transfer it wherever you like.

As a general rule, I never have my domain names and hosting with the same company. Hosting and domain registration are very different businesses, and it's best to deal with specialists in each.

That's probably what you're running into with ixwebhosting telling you that they can't redirect your domain.

Good idea. With GoDaddy it is very easy to "forward" any domain to another. .org to .com for example.

 

Godaddy is not great but they let you easily pay for several years and redirect.

Btw, anyone knows, when redirecting a domain, what are the consequences of using 301 (moved temporarly) vs 302 (moved permanently)?

 

Have you thought about domain aliasing instead of redirecting?

 

As far as I know, this tells the search engine that the content will be avaible soon or that it should index the new domain instead.

 

Redirecting = SEO Suicide... Don't do it, hell I will give you cost price on the domain if you are contemplating redirecting. Also I will transfer ONE domain for free if you host with Apto Hosting you can check out our rates at www.aptohosting.com/shared.php.

Tom
www.aptohosting.com
1-866-404-9090

 

Care to elaborate on this one? I (and many pro SEOs) use 301 redirects on a regular basis and I've never had any negative consequences.

Would love to hear what's behind you statement.

 

We notice that whenever one our client decides to redirect to another page, their PR drops drastically. I do not have any evidence of this, it is just what I have seen!

Tom C.
www.aptohosting.com

 

I don't see why it would hurt PR? Especially with extensions. I could maybe see it hurting you if you had like 100 redirects to one site...(which is not usually feasible bc of the domain market now)

 

Careful of the SEO suicide statements...you'll confuse the newbs

Make sure your redirects are explicitly 301. I believe in php if you don't specify the default is 302, which Google doesn't handle that well (or at least didn't).

Here the code to do a proper .php redirect:

PHP:

<?php
// Permanent redirection
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://www.your-new-address.com/");
exit();
?>

Recently I moved my most profitable site from ASP to php...so Windows hosting to Linux - YIKES. I have an .htaccess file with 301 redirects for over 330 pages, and we didn't have any drop off in traffic at any point during or after the move. It's 6 months later and no negative effects.

 

I'm pretty sure GoDaddy gives you the option, so you can pick 301.

 

Hi,

Godaddy allows you to choose between 301 (permanent) or 302 (temporary) when you do domain forwarding.

cheers.