If you wish to register a domain to make sure that no one else will take it, however, you have not created the site for it yet, you can park it. That is a feature that registrar companies provide if a domain address isn't linked to any web or e mail hosting service. That way, you can protect a brand name, for example, and you'll own the domain name in question even though it won't load any content. If you want, you can choose some standard template that the registrar provides, like For Sale or Under Construction, you can also direct the domain name to a new web address. Your second option is very helpful in case you own a number of domains, but you want every one of them to open the same site. For instance, you can register domain.net and domain.org, then park them and direct them to domain.com. In this example, you'll need hosting for the third domain name only and the traffic to the other ones will be redirected to it.