Let’s go round again!

[danskinner]

Hi there - I’m new to this forum & realise that this has been discussed before but I’ve tried a few of the suggestions & nothing seems to work.. I’d be grateful if y’all could have a look at my particular set of circumstances :


I have recently set up a website on the 50Mb webspace that came with my ADSL (512 - pure IP home user - wires only) package - www.danskinner.f2s.com(/index.shtml)

Now that's all fine & dandy but I now want to redirect traffic to it from my existing domain name 'www.danskinner.co.uk'.

I own danskinner.co.uk by virtue of having control of it at 123reg.co.uk, where I can either set up conventional web forwarding or indeed tweak the DNS values.. and it's here that it all goes a bit hazy!

I would 'like' for people who type in 'www.danskinner.co.uk' to be served the website on my f2s webspace but while still maintaining 'www.danskinner.co.uk' in the address bar (something that wasn't possible with simple unframed web forwarding & i couldn't use framed because that caused it's own problems..)

I 'thought' it might just be a case of adding:
www - CNAME - danskinner.f2s.com.
in the 'Manage DNS' section for danskinner.co.uk, but I've tried that & still nothing..
I would have preffered to forward to an 'A' value but none of the obvious IP addresses seem to work:
- 195.137.57.134 - 'WAN IP address' as specified on f2s member’s area
- 194.106.33.35 - address that I get when I ping www.danskinner.f2s.com
etc..

So to summarise I currently 'just' have a 'www CNAME' tag but nothing doing! (2+ days have elapsed to allow time for propagation)
NB. I'm not too bothered about MX email tags (although an understanding would be appreciated!) because I soley use hotmail..

Any help from you guys would be greatly appreciated - I emailed f2s tech support and this is their (not very helpful) reply in it's entirity!:

----------------------------
Daniel

If you try adding a CNAME record for www.danskinner.co.uk to point to
www.danskinner.f2s.com this should be ok.

Kind regards
Scott
f2s Technical Support
----------------------------

NB. also, I have seen references to an DNS section on the f2s members area but do not seem to have that facility on my account details page..

I'm fairly sure that I'm simply missing out on something fundamental!
Cheers for any help/insight in advance!

Dan

[Justin]

I'm afraid your not allowed to do this.

The message from Scott seems a bit incorrect to me. It has always been that if you want to point a domain name to your free webspace, you are only allowed to do this with a redirection.

If you want to have your domain properly hosted by F2S on their serviers, you will need to buy seperate hosting unless the terms and conditions have changed recentley.

You only get access to DNS settings in your members area if you have a domain with freedom2surf, so this is why you do not have it.

[petevick]

I own hedrasoftware.co.uk and this is registered at easily.co.uk. From there web site I can set up a forewarding URL to anywhere I like, at the moment this is to my F2S web space, and it all works quite well, type in www.hedrasoftware.co.uk and you will end up at me F2s index.htm page. Don't know if this helps, just how I have done it.

[Justin]

Yep, but thats URL cloaking, it's not true domain hosting, I never said that this was impossible, I'm talking about proper domain hosting, eg when the URL changes in the Address bar to yourdomain.com/page rather than stay as your domain name.

[danskinner]

Cheers Justin & petevick,

Just to clarify I’m not bothered about ‘domain cloaking’ - Infact I’d much rather users see just ‘www.danskinner.co.uk’ in their address bar the whole time rather than the big long f2s address plus all the messy variable passing that goes on!

Justin, when you say “If you want to have your domain properly hosted by F2S on their servers” - what exactly do you mean?
Surely the fact that there’s 50Mb of webspace included for my £22.50p/m qualifies as ‘proper’ hosting?
As I said in my original post, the site is up and running at www.danskinner.f2s.com - isn’t it ‘being’ properly hosted??..

petevick, you’re redirecting to your f2s webspace via ‘traditional’ framed web forwarding - when you view the source to your ‘www.hedrasoftware.co.uk’ site you see:

<html>
<head>
<!-- url = http://www.petevick.f2s.com/hedra/index.htm -->
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"><title>hedrasoftware.co.uk</title></head>
<frameset rows="100%,*" border="0" framespacing="0" frameborder="0">
<frame src="http://www.petevick.f2s.com/hedra/index.htm">
</frameset>
<noframes>
<body>
The website for hedrasoftware.co.uk can be found by clicking <a href="http://www.petevick.f2s.com/hedra/index.htm">here</a>.
hedrasoftware.co.uk is registered through <a href="http://easily.co.uk">Easily.co.uk - get web site hosting or domain name registration here</a><br></body>
</noframes>
</html>

..this might be fine for you but my site has issues with frames so I’d rather not use this method if possible.

What I’m ‘still’ after is an understanding of exactly why I cannot just enter a CNAME in the DNS config for ‘danskinner.co.uk’ pointing to ‘danskinner.f2s.com’??

Also, SURELY my f2s webspace has an IP address that I could use in an ‘A’ reference??
Why doesn't my WAN IP address resolve to my webspace??

Still confused,

Dan

[Justin]

The case always has been that if you want to host a domain, you have to pay for domain hosting and transfer/register a domain with f2s first on top of your ADSL Package.

You are not allowed to point a domain to your free web space with true domain hosting, only with redirection are you allowed to do this, this is because f2s gains exposure from the .f2s.com part of the address in your domain name.

Your F2S webspace will have an IP address, but it will be the one of the server that hosts 99% of the .f2s.com domain names, and even by using an A record for your domain to this, it will not work.

It has been like this for some years now, so it's nothing new. Most ISP's won't allow you full domain hosting in the price of a standard monthly fee, although there are some exceptions.