How-to · Beginner · 5 minutes
How to Set Up Domain Forwarding
Send everyone who types one domain straight through to another one — a practical, jargon-free walkthrough with the classic mistake flagged before you make it.
Straight answer first
In a line: send everyone who types one domain straight through to another one — a beginner-level task that takes 5 minutes.
Below you get the exact steps, the classic snag, and a tip from the support desk. Where our platform handles a step for you, the guide says so rather than making you do the robot's work.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 1 August 2026
Beginner
Difficulty level
5 minutes
Time to allow
5
Stages
24/7
Help at any hour
This guide assumes no expertise at all — just a hosting account, a browser and 5 minutes of attention. Every instruction works on our platform exactly as written, and carries over to any standard cPanel host.
One promise before you start: nothing in this guide is irreversible. Where a step could bite, we say so and give you the undo.
The whole job at a glance
Here is the route in full: pick permanent or temporary, decide what happens to the path, build the redirect rule, make sure ssl covers the forwarder and test all four front doors.
Each stage is a few minutes of steady clicking — the time it takes depends mostly on how familiar the control panel already feels. The detailed steps sit further down this page; skim the whole route once before you begin.
Read this before the first click
Setting up the forward and forgetting the certificate on the forwarding name. Anyone reaching https://olddomain hits a security warning before the redirect can fire — and those are precisely the people who bookmarked you.
Forewarned really is forearmed here. This one mistake accounts for most of the frustration the subject produces, and it is entirely avoidable once somebody names it.
The shortcut, straight from the support desk
Forward the common misspellings and the .com or .co.uk twin of your brand while you are in there. It costs very little and quietly collects mistyped traffic for as long as you keep the names.
Small habits like this are the real difference between people who find hosting easy and people who find it stressful. The tools are identical; the working method is not.
What you can skip on a Hosting Seller plan
Several steps in this guide exist only because hosting historically made you do them. On our plans SSL issues itself, backups run daily without being asked, and one-click installers replace the manual setup entirely. What is left is the part that is genuinely yours.
And when a step misbehaves anyway, support answers at any hour with the actual fix, not a knowledge-base link and a shrug. Half our best guides began life as a pattern in the ticket queue.
Why the job is simpler on our plans
Every walkthrough on our how-to shelf is tested on the platform we actually run — cPanel, LiteSpeed, NVMe, one-click installs — so the instructions match your screen instead of gesturing vaguely at it.
Mailboxes on your own domain are part of the plan, never an add-on sold back to you at checkout.
- Step by step, tested exactly as printed
- The snag flagged before you reach it
- The dull steps are already automated
- People on hand at any hour if you stall
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
Written from real tickets
Our guides come off the support desk, so the snags flagged here are the ones people genuinely hit.
No jargon toll
Terms are explained where they appear or linked to the glossary — nothing assumes you already know.
Works exactly as written
Every step tested on the platform we run — no 'your host may differ' hand-waving anywhere.
Help on the counter
Stuck on step three at midnight? Support answers at any hour, mid-guide included.
Scoped honestly
Send everyone who types one domain straight through to another one is a beginner-level task — this guide budgets 5 minutes and says which steps the platform absorbs.
The undo is always named
Where a step could bite, the guide says so and tells you how to put it back again.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Pick permanent or temporary
A 301 tells search engines the move is for good and passes the ranking signals along with the visitor. A 302 says this is a short-term arrangement and leaves the original's standing where it is.
- 2
Decide what happens to the path
Forwarding with the path sends olddomain.com/page to newdomain.com/page. Plain forwarding drops every visitor on the homepage and lets them find their own way. The first is nearly always the kinder choice.
- 3
Build the redirect rule
Point the spare domain at your hosting, then set up the rule in cPanel's Redirects screen from the old name to the destination. A .htaccess rule does the identical job if you prefer writing it out.
- 4
Make sure SSL covers the forwarder
The forwarding domain needs a certificate of its own. An https visitor has to complete the handshake before your redirect ever gets the chance to fire, so no certificate means no redirect.
- 5
Test all four front doors
Try http and https, with www and without, plus one deep link. All four should land exactly where you meant them to, and it takes about a minute to check.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- Site migration done for you by our staff, at no charge
- A 30-day money-back guarantee on every hosting plan
- Staging copies so changes get tested before they go live
- A backup taken daily, with restores you run yourself
- A free SSL certificate on every plan, reissued before it lapses
- Nothing added at setup — no joining fee, ever
- Webmail in the browser plus IMAP, POP and SMTP for your own client
- Spam and virus filtering fitted to every mailbox
- A 99.9% uptime commitment, watched by monitoring day and night
- The Softaculous installer for one-click application setup
Across the Counter
The questions we get asked most
Will a 301 carry my search rankings to the new domain?
Largely yes. A permanent redirect passes most of the ranking signals to the destination over the following weeks and months. It is the mechanism behind every domain migration ever done properly, so leave it in place for the long haul.
Do I need hosting in order to forward a domain?
The redirect has to be served by something — hosting, the registrar's own forwarding feature, or a standalone redirect service. Ours comes with the hosting, and parked domains on any plan can redirect as often as you want at no extra cost.
Do you shift an existing site across at no charge?
We do. Open a ticket with the login details for your current host and the whole lot comes over: files, databases, mailboxes and configuration. You check the copy before DNS changes hands, and the old site keeps serving customers until the new one takes the traffic, so nobody ever sees a gap.
What uptime do you commit to, and who is watching?
We commit to 99.9% uptime and watch it continuously. That figure is an operational target rather than a poster line, and the alerting behind it usually has an engineer on a problem before the first customer notices anything is wrong.
Is the SSL certificate genuinely free?
On every plan, with nothing held back. The certificate is issued the moment your domain points here and reissues itself well before expiry. The encryption is the same as a paid DV certificate — paid tiers exist only for wildcard coverage or organisation validation, which most sites never need.
How quickly can I be up and running?
Minutes, not days. The account opens the moment the order clears, the domain — free for year one on annual plans — attaches straight away, and the one-click installer puts WordPress or any of 400+ applications on the page before you leave your chair. Already have a site elsewhere? Hand it over and we move it free, usually inside a day.
Can one plan hold more than a single website?
From the Pro tier upward, yes — several sites, each with its own domain, mailboxes and certificate, all under one account. If those extra sites belong to clients rather than to you, reseller hosting is the better fit: it gives each one proper separation.
Read next
How to Deploy a Site With Git
Push to deploy, and put the drag-and-drop routine behind you for good — advanced level, about 45 minutes of setup.
How to Create an Email Forwarder
Route an address to wherever the person who answers it actually reads mail — beginner level, about 3 minutes each.
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Packing up and moving host? Take our checklist.
A plain running order for a move nobody notices: what to copy first, how to carry email across without dropping a single message, when to point DNS, and the two slips behind nearly every hour of downtime we get called about.
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