# Newb using BigCartel - Redirecting? Hosting?



## kid.twist (Jan 7, 2010)

Just starting out - screenprinting my designs on shirts myself in small batches. 

Someday I'd like to have a standalone e-commerce site for selling me.
Today I'm working off a gold (free) BigCartel account.

My store is at [blank].bigcartel.com.
I own the domain www.[blank].com.
I've never had anything more than a FB page, I am html and all other types of coding ignorant.

Two questions
1 - I'd like the www address to redirect to the bigcartel shop. I want to put the www address on all my promotional materials. Should I use the temporary code or the permanent one? What's the difference? Does masking cause any issues that ignorant me is better off avoiding? 

2 - I don't have a host - at what point will I need one? The bigcartel shop as of today is only the basic one. Only image is currently just one shirt - I will eventually want a good looking (and paid for) cartel shop.


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## Fr4nk13 (Feb 10, 2010)

Long gone are the days that HTML is the only platform you need to know haha.

1: I believe BigCartel offers domain hosting, as in, the www.[blank].com will actually be your bigcartel site. By doing this, you can ensure that whenever it's time to upgrade/get a new site, you can still use all of your old promotional materials to direct to your new page (same domain)

2: You'll need a host as soon as you outgrow BigCartel. Whenever you want to add more pages, items, blogs etc. you'll need to get yourself a decent hosting solutions to hold your website for you. It sounds to me that at this point you don't have to worry about it. But further down the road, when it's time to leave the BigCartel nest, you'll have a lot of doors open for you and a lot of paths to choose from.


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## vallians (May 13, 2010)

If you go with professional, you better use own hosting, own domain rather than using FB  because once your customer remember your link, it will forever. IMHO.


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