If you'd like to register a domain name to make sure that nobody else is going to take it, but you haven't developed the website for it yet, you could park it. That is a service that registrar companies provide whenever a domain name isn't linked to any web or e mail hosting service. By doing this, you can protect a brand name, for instance, and you'll own the domain in question although it will not load any content. If you would like, you may choose some standard template that the registrar provides, like For Sale or Under Construction, you can also forward the domain name to another web address. Your second option is extremely helpful in case you own a number of domain names, but you want all of them to open the same site. As an example, you can register domain.net and domain.org, then park them and direct them to domain.com. In this example, you're going to need hosting for the third domain name only and the traffic to the other ones is going to be redirected to it.