If you want to register a domain name to make certain that nobody else will take it, but you have not developed the website for it yet, you could park it. It's a feature that registrar companies offer whenever a domain name is not linked to any web or e mail hosting service. That way, you can protect a brand name, for instance, and you'll own the domain in question even though it will not load any content. If you'd like, you can pick some standard template that the registrar offers, like For Sale or Under Construction, you can also direct the domain name to an alternative web address. Your second option is very useful in case you own a few domains, but you want all of them to open the same site. As an illustration, you can register domain.net and domain.org, then park them and forward them to domain.com. In this example, you are going to need hosting for the third domain only and the traffic to the other ones will be redirected to it.