www.no-ip.com

[monak]

Can someone give me a layperson's explanation of what www.no-ip.com does? Tim only gives it one sentence in the book. Basically, he says to host your muse website with two providers since they're so inexpensive noawadays. But what does no-ip do? Is it in case one of your providers is down, it would re-direct to the other one? I'm confused. :confused:

[zoot]

No-ip.com offers a forwarding service, so you can easily point your domain.com name from one host to another just by tweaking a setting on no-ip.com.

So let's say you have a muse called Saleswebsite and you own saleswebsite.com. Normally you'd pick one host who would give you a url like saleswebsite.host1.com and you'd set it up with them so that saleswebsite.com points there.

Tim is saying that instead you should pick two different hosting companies and have the same site content on both. So you now have saleswebsite.host1.com and saleswebsite.host2.com. You then sign-up with no-ip.com's plus service to have saleswebsite.com point to say something.no-ip.com and make your no-ip.com settings forward to saleswebsite.host1.com with the option set so that the user only sees saleswebsite.com and neither "something.no-ip.com" nor "saleswebsite.host1.com" ever appears in the users browser address bar.

Why have this extra layer? Because the moment you see that host1.com is down or having problems, you can login to no-ip.com and tell it to point saleswebsite.com to host2 at saleswebsite.host2.com and boom you're back in business.

I use the same technique for email addresses. I have my main email address that I give to everyone just be a forwarding address that points to the place I actually check my email. I've had the same email address for 10 years but the place I point it two has changed many times as I've moved cities and changed internet providers.

Hope that helps.