: This process has different names, but one of the most common ones is "masking" or "domain masking" since one of the domain names disappears behind the "virtual mask' of the second domain name.

This process has different names, but one of the most common ones is "masking" or "domain masking" since one of the domain names disappears behind the "virtual mask' of the second domain name.

The process of domain forwarding is simple, but involves two different domains, for instance, example.com and another-example.com; it works by allowing the content located on a specific combination of content on a server and hosted domain to be reachable from a second, different, domain name which has no content by itself.

Scenario 1 - From username.blogcompany.com to username.com

A persons decides to have a blog, but doesn't want to have the problems associated with setting the software, taking care of security, etc, so decides to use one of the public offers (free or paid) on a professional blog company, for instance, username.blogcompany.com.

After some time, this person decides to have a domain name registered, for instance, username.com. And he wants the content of the blog to be accessed on that address, but still doesn't want to have all the hassle involved with maintaining his website, he is happy with the services offered by blogcompany.com, so he decides to set a domain forwarding from username.com to username.blogcompany.com.

With the above arrangement, all the content is still on blogcompany.com, so they take care of all the hardware and software maintenance. He can still reach the content on username.blogcompany.com, edit it, add more pages, etc, and the users will type a much better looking and much more personal address, username.com.

Scenario 2 - From username.blogcompany.com/index.php?pageid=1234567890 to username.com

Other common scenario, with a very similar setting, is to avoid having URLs like username.blogcompany.com/index.php?pageid=1234567890 without using any kind of server side redirection.

Both of the above scenarios combined are also a very common one.

Process of the domain forwarding

First

On blogcompany.com

An account is created
Content is published
Content is reached using username.blogcompany.com

Then username.com is registered and ...

On hosting company

username.com is hosted
A page with frames is created and one of the frames points to username.blogcompany.com

This would be a common frame config for the above situation

<frameset rows="100%,*" border="0">
<frame src="http://username.blogcompany.com" frameborder="0" />
<frame frameborder="0" noresize />
</frameset>