Every so often I think about transferring a bunch of .co.uk domains to another registrar/tag holder, they're currently with Freeparking, and are pretty much just parked - they don't see a lot of use except for one which gets a few visitors.

The one thing Freeparking do offer is "proper" DNS, we currently have all the sites pointing to the IP address of our main website, and email is forwarded per domain to a catchall address @ourcompany.

I'm not a web/html person and I'm unsure of the advantage/disadvantage of "frame-based forwarding", to quote from the Q&A section on Firevisions (UK registrar, www.firevision.net) website:

Can I use non-frame-based web forwarding?
No - Firevision only provides frame-based forwarding, with meta tags for search engines.

What does this mean in practical terms? The site that does see a few visitors is hosted at our company premises on a dedicated IP, no host headers or anything.

regards
Paul

Non-framed forwarding basically redirects the user to another URL. So if you site is domain.com and you non-frame forward it to http://sector89.freespace.net/~john/page6.html, then when someone visits www.domain.com - they will be redirected to http://sector89.freespace.net/~john/page6.html and that is the address they will see in the address bar.

The beauty of framed-forwarding is that the redirect address is hidden in the source. So if you frame-forward domain.com to http://sector89.freespace.net/~john/page6.html, then when someone visits www.domain.com - that is the address that stays in their address bar! But they have been redirected to http://sector89.freespace.net/~john/page6.html with out them knowing it.

The problem with frames is that the address www.domain.com will stay in the address bar, regardless of what link is clicked on (unless the webmaster uses target="_top" in all their links).

If your happy with hosting your DNS with your domain registrar and using your web hosts dedicated IP, go for it! It does make it a lot easier to control and manage your domains when you control your DNS zone files at your registrar.

Reading back over my original question I'm not sure I explained it that well.

To summarise, these domains are currently with Freeparking who offer "direct" DNS control. For various reasons I'd sooner shift them from Freeparking to another registrar (they're .co.uk domains so it'd be the IPSTAG).

The place I have in mind (firevision.net) don't have an online DNS panel, they only offer Frames-Based forwarding (they say they will make changes to DNS if they receive a request via email).

Basically I want to know what I lose by using forwarding - from the sounds of it very little (assuming target="_top" is used)?

Paul