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Knowledge Base

Why Domain Forwarding with URL Masking Fails

When forwarded domains with masking do not load correctly. This article explains why URL masking fails for certain websites.

 

URL Masking is a feature that allows you to retain your domain name in the browser's address bar while forwarding to another domain or URL. This is achieved by making use of HTML frames in the top page hosted on your domain.
 

In other words, your domain name does not actually get forwarded. Instead, it loads a local HTML page from the domain forwarding server which contains a frameset and the destination page is displayed within that frame.
 

You can read more about Framing on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(World_Wide_Web) 

Certain websites are designed to not show contents in a frame. This is because of Clickjacking attacks and defenses like X-Frame-options,
which are rising in popularity, are preventing iframes from being a valid way to display content.

Many online service providers have also implemented their own defenses to "Clickjacking" attacks within their native UI. Due to this,
the iFraming of some external websites may no longer be possible.

When you iframe one such website which has been designed to not show any content in a frame, you would ends up seeing a blank page.
The exact error message can be seen if you access the site using Microsoft Internet Explorer or Microsoft Edge on Windows 10.

 

Here's a screenshot of the error message you can see in Microsoft Edge:
 

Testing Image


This isn't really an issue with our domain forwarding system. It's just that the destination site refuses to serve any content with its URL masked. You must disable URL Masking for it to work.
 

If you specifically want the browser to retain your domain name, then please ask your hosting provider to add your domain name as an alias domain for your website and point the DNS of your domain directly to the webserver by either changing its name servers or modifying the A records in the current zone.