If you wish to register a domain to make sure that nobody else will take it, however, you haven't developed the web site for it yet, you may park it. It's a service that registrar companies offer if a domain is not connected to any web or e mail hosting service. This way, you'll be able to protect a brand name, for example, and you'll own the domain name in question even though it won't load any content. If you'd like, you may choose some standard template that the registrar offers, like For Sale or Under Construction, you can also forward the domain to another web address. Your second option is very helpful in case you own a number of domain names, but you want each and every one of them to open the same site. For example, you can register domain.net and domain.org, then park them and forward them to domain.com. In this example, you'll need hosting for the third domain address only and the traffic to the other ones will be redirected to it.