If you want to register a domain to ensure that nobody else will take it, however, you haven't built the site for it yet, you may park it. This is a service that registrar companies provide if a domain isn't linked to any web or e mail hosting service. That way, you are able to protect a brand name, for example, and you'll own the domain address in question even though it won't load any content. If you wish, you can select some standard template that the registrar offers, like For Sale or Under Construction, or you can forward the domain name to a new web address. Your second option is very helpful if you own a few domains, but you want all of them to open the same site. For instance, you could register domain.net and domain.org, then park them and forward them to domain.com. In this example, you will need hosting for the third domain name only and the traffic to the other ones is going to be redirected to it.