If you'd like to register a domain to make sure that nobody else is going to take it, however, you have not built the site for it yet, you could park it. This is a service that registrar companies provide when 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 will own the domain address in question even though it will not load any content. If you wish, you can select some default template that the registrar provides, like For Sale or Under Construction, or you can forward the domain name to a different web address. The second option is extremely helpful if you own a few domain names, but you want all of them to open the same site. For instance, you could register domain.net and domain.org, then park them and forward them to domain.com. In this example, you're going to need hosting for the third domain only and the traffic to the other ones will be redirected to it.