I was just wondering if any of you web hosts charge for domain forwarding.

I have been doing this at no charge but I am currently using Plesk and every domain (forwarded or not) counts as another domain on your liscense.

Also, there is the necessary time required to initially setup the domain in Plesk so that it forwards.

Usually, this is not a problem but, for some larger customers with 10+ domains it can begin to be a bit of a problem.

If you do charge for this service what are some typical prices that you charge.

Thanks,

David Delisle

Do you sell domain names as well? One option is to become an enom reseller, then to offer free domain forwarding to your clients you just need to ask your client to transfer the domain to enom and enom does the dns hosting or domain and email redirection from their servers for free. Just a thought.

Originally posted by WebBloom
I was just wondering if any of you web hosts charge for domain forwarding.

I have been doing this at no charge but I am currently using Plesk and every domain (forwarded or not) counts as another domain on your liscense.

Also, there is the necessary time required to initially setup the domain in Plesk so that it forwards.

Usually, this is not a problem but, for some larger customers with 10+ domains it can begin to be a bit of a problem.

If you do charge for this service what are some typical prices that you charge.

Thanks,

David Delisle

We do not with Ensim due to the unlimited domain lisence but we would change have to charge if using Plesk. It is unfair to you not to.

Why unfair? Just get the unlimited domain licence and be done with it. :)

What kills me is that it still adds a forwarded domain as a vhost with yet another entry in the httpd.include. :mad:

I am currently using OpenSRS to register domain names so there is no automatic domain forwarding option.

I agree that I can always get an unlimited domain liscense for Plesk but, ideally I would like to have only a 300 domain liscense per server and limit my users to under 300 per server.

Also, I am concerned more about the time to setup the domains and then forward them. I know it only takes about a minute to do this but, what about the guy with 50 domains that he would like pointing to his website. This starts to become unfeasible.

For those of you that do charge, what are the rates that you charge for this service. Do you think a onetime fee of $5 is reasonable. Or, would it be more fair to say $5 for every 5 domains registered and the first 5 are free?

Again, I can always just take on the cost myself and keep the customer happy. But, I find that most customers do not factor your time into their cost and they assume that everything on the computer can be done instantaneously. If you give away too much for free it usually comes back to haunt you later.

David Delisle

When using namebased hosting with apache I guess you could just add the domains to the ServerAlias option inside the VirtualHost declaration. This should fix it :)

David, we're in the same boat as you I guess. We don't charge for additional server aliases. We provide DNS and a server alias in apache for each one for no fee.

We don't have to add them one at a time in Plesk though, which I'm sure is what is causing the hassle.

For now I think I'll just continue as is and offer this for free. It currently isn't too much of a hassle. And, if I come across a user with an unreasonable amount of domains to be forwarded I'll handle this individually.

I just find that there are so many web hosts out there that offer the world for free that you start losing money rather than making money by taking on additinonal clients ;)

Thanks for all the comments.