If you wish to register a domain name to ensure that no one else is going to take it, however, you have not developed the website for it yet, you could park it. It's a service that registrar companies offer if a domain isn't connected 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 even though it will not open any content. If you want, you may choose some standard template that the registrar offers, such as For Sale or Under Construction, or you can forward the domain name to a different web address. Your second option is very useful in case you own a number of domain names, but you want all of them to open the same site. As an illustration, you could 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 will be redirected to it.