domain parking Vs domain forwarding?

How is domain parking different from domain forwarding? I have been reading about the 2 of them but the more I read the more I get confused. Can someone please tell me what the difference is.

I was trying to park my domain name on top of another but the parking is not doing it for me (I am unable to access the web site that I parked). SO I am thinking about may be domain forwarding. Please help.

Domain parking is basically when you own the domain, but you aren't really doing anything with it.. so somebody (usually the registrar) lets you park it on their site.. basically, their DNS point to a page on their servers that says 'this site is coming soon..' or something like that.

Domain forwarding is when a server answers to your domain name, but doesn't actually host your content. Rather, they redirect to another server. There are usually two reasons for doing this..
one is that you have your site hosted by somebody who does not provide domain hosting, so you have to use the Domain forwarder to forward your users to your content host. So, visitors enter "www.domain.com" and end up at your site (which is actually at "www.freewebhost.com/members/meohmy"). So visitors can enter either address and end up at the same site.
the other common reason is that you host your content on your computer at home, and you either don't have a static IP (for example, if you use a dial up service) or you don't like the idea of people going directly to your home computer(in which case you'd use sort of a proxy domain forwarding). In this case, you run some software on your home machine that periodically tells their server what your current IP address is (or only tells their server this when it changes) and whenever their server receives hits for your site, they can redirect the user to your current IP.


I may have gotten some of the details wrong, but the basic idea is there..

domain parking = you own domain but aren't using it for anything.

domain forwarding = your domain is hosted by one server, but your content is hosted by another.

Thank you for your explanation. Please make this clear to me: So which one should I use if say because I have a domain name which usually surfers type wrong and so I decide to buy the 2 domain names. Now I want when the surfers type my URL wrong that they still get to my web site (here are 2 examples I originally had my-domain.com but usually surfers type mydomain.com and so now I have bought mydomain.com to counter this problem) should I use forwarding or parking?

Thank you again.

I have done some research, on your behalf.. and must correct myself, somewhat.

if you park the domain.. then you are basically just using another domain name for your server.. so if YOU do the parking, then this is what you want. This is also referred to as a "pointed domain"

Places that offer to park your domain are doing what i said in my previous post.. just pointing your domain at a page that says the domain is owned and coming soon.. see my gnations.net for an example of a domain parked by godaddy.

Thanks, I appreciate