Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Dave00

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 2, 2003
884
119
Pittsburgh
Seems like this should be relatively straightforward, but I can't get a good answer on it.

I'd like to setup a website to be hosted by my .mac account. However, I'd like to have the user type www.website-name.com to load the page. I know how to purchase a domain name, but not how to use my .mac account to host the html, pictures, etc.

One option would be to have www.website-name.com automatically jump to homepage.mac.com/my-apple-id/etc. but a more elegant solution would be to have it be more transparent. Surely there's a relatively painless way to do this?

Thanks.

D. Sacco
 
What you need is a redirect

Dave00 said:
Seems like this should be relatively straightforward, but I can't get a good answer on it.

I'd like to setup a website to be hosted by my .mac account. However, I'd like to have the user type www.website-name.com to load the page. I know how to purchase a domain name, but not how to use my .mac account to host the html, pictures, etc.

One option would be to have www.website-name.com automatically jump to homepage.mac.com/my-apple-id/etc. but a more elegant solution would be to have it be more transparent. Surely there's a relatively painless way to do this?

Thanks.

D. Sacco

no-ip.com, you need to do a host redirect. so when someone looks for your www.website-name.com, it keeps that name but REDIRECTS to your .mac site for the actual html. you will most likely need to pay a fee for the redirect, or you can use the free redirect and your domain name will end in no-ip.com or something like that. my page is on my computer, but its name is http://ducktapeandglue.no-ip.org. same basic thing, but it will be hosted on .mac.
 
Great! I'm pretty sure this was what I was looking for. I guess "masking" is the term, for keeping the user from knowing that all the hosting data is at .mac. Not that I want to disguise the fact, but you know how people are. If homepage.mac.com/my-apple-id/blah.html comes up in the location bar, they're going to get confused.

Of course, it's not clear to me from the godaddy.com website as to what happens if the user clicks on a link. I.e., if I have a second page for the website, I want to have them click on the link and it say my-domain.com/page2.html rather than homepage.mac.com/etc. I suppose I could avoid this by doing the whole thing in frames, but I'd rather not if I didn't have to.

ghostee said:
I can't attest to how good their service is, but for under $10 Godaddy.com will register your domain for one year, and provide masked forwarding for free.
 
I hosted by site off of .Mac for awhile. With domain masking, any link you click on that is in the same folder as the index.html file will still display www.domain-name.com at the top. If you create a new folder under the sites folder on your idisk, those files will show up under www.domain-name.com/newfolder.

.Mac hosting works really well. I've hosted some pretty big files and never been brought down for excessive bandwidth.

I switched to "actual" hosting because I needed databases and some php, which .Mac isn't very helpful with.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.