what is the difference between domain redirecting and domain forwarding?

Question

I want to know what is the exact difference between domain redirecting and domain forwarding(with mask and without masking)?

Suppose I have purchased domain called example.com. I have created subdomains for example.com namely www.example.com, abc.example.com.

Scenario 1

Application is running on example.com. Suppose i am hitting www.example.com,it should display the output of example.com without changing my url.

Vistior goes to : www.example.com

Content to be displayed : Application running on example.com

Address Bar Displays : www.example.com

what is the above scenario..is it domain forwarding or domain redirecting?

Scenario 2

Application is running on example.com. Suppose i am hitting abc.example.com,it should display the output of example.com with changing my url.

Vistior goes to : abc.example.com

Content to be displayed : Application running on example.com

Address Bar Displays : example.com

what is the above scenario..is it domain forwarding or domain redirecting?

Scenario 3 :

Application is running on example.com(Hello world). Another application is running on example1.net(apache) Suppose i am hitting example.com,it should display the output of example1.net without changing my url.

Vistior goes to : example.com

Content to be displayed : Application running on example1.net

Address Bar Displays : example.com

what is the above scenario..is it domain forwarding or domain redirecting?

Scenario 4 :

Application is running on example.com(Hello world). Another application is running on example1.net(apache) Suppose i am hitting example.com,it should display the output of example1.com with changing my url.

Vistior goes to : example.com

Content to be displayed : Application running on example1.net

Address Bar Displays : example1.net

what is the above scenario..is it domain forwarding or domain redirecting?

Please help me to sort it out?

Answer 1

There are only two scenarios here (Hello world application is irrelevant since it is never reached) (1 and 3 are the same, 2 and 4 are the same)

If the browser is redirected to another URL (which is done by server sending 301 or 302 response to the client, along with the new Location) and the address bar changes, that is commonly called "Redirect". Some service providers call this "domain forwarding without masking".

If the initially contacted server fetches the content from another host/server, and returns that content to the client (which is unaware of what happened behind the scene and therefore there is no change in address bar), that is usually called "Reverse proxy(ing)". Some service providers call this "domain forwarding with masking".