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I have a personal blog that I've left to die, but I'm still paying hosting fees every month. I'd like to hang on to my .com domain and have it redirect to my Twitter page instead, or maybe some other, free blog hosting.

What's the cheapest way to achieve this and how would I go about doing it?

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If you are paying hosting fees, simply change your index/default.htm/html and put

 <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://twitter.com/wilhil" />

Or whatever your twitter is!

However, if your hosting company is seporate to your domain registrar - or if you are given a choice / no minimum contract, cancel your hosting and point your name server to ns1.everydns.net and ns2.everydns.net

Everydns allows you to set up a free account and they can do all the forwarding for you without having to worry about anything. Best of all, it is free!

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EveryDNS looks to be exactly what I was looking for. Many thanks! – GraemeF Oct 3 '09 at 15:37
Can EveryDNS redirect a domain like example.com to another site, including a path? It seems it can only do DNS, which is not good enough to redirect to Twitter. (Though Twitter currently does accept non-twitter.com host names, using DNS one could not redirect to a certain path like /wilhil. In other words: it seems EveryDNS can only do what one could test using a hosts file?) – Arjan Oct 3 '09 at 15:41
@Arjan van Bentem, it can do both - it is a full on DNS service but also provides the ability to redirect to full websites such as a twitter page. (They call this facility webhop) – William Hilsum Oct 3 '09 at 16:00
Ok! Funny (well, odd) that everydns.com/aboutus.php doesn't mention that. It might even do the horrible redirect-in-a-frame then? If so, don't tell anyone. ;-) – Arjan Oct 3 '09 at 16:04
I reckon a header redirect is comparable in speed to a DNS solution and is miles ahead of a meta refresh. – Sam152 Oct 3 '09 at 16:19
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have it redirect to my Twitter page instead, or maybe some other, free blog hosting

For both these examples you probably don't have the power to make your domain known to whoever is hosting those services. And the target URL is not a domain, but includes a path.

So, the following is not an answer to your question, but just to explain why this cannot be done using plain DNS. Or: why it cannot be done while keeping your domain name in the URL (unless you would use some redirection in a frame, but then the URL does not change when your visitor goes to another page).

As for the domain: currently Twitter does respond to whatever maps to its IP address. Like twitter.com, 168.143.161.20, but also example.com if you map that domain to the same IP address. (You could test that using your hosts file on your own computer.)

However, some sites might not accept unknown host names, or may show some other default site. Like for youtube.com, 74.125.77.139 does not show YouTube because the browser does not specify Host: youtube.com in the request, which makes the web server respond differently even though YouTube does use that IP address:

host www.youtube.com

www.youtube.com is an alias for youtube-ui.l.google.com.
youtube-ui.l.google.com has address 74.125.77.139
youtube-ui.l.google.com has address 74.125.77.100
[..]

As for the path: in a DNS you cannot map a domain to another domain including a path. So, you cannot set up a DNS to map example.com to twitter.com/example.

You would indeed need some refresh redirection like Wil described, or some third-party service that does that (or something called "HTTP 301 moved permanently") for you.

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Sorry, a little confused here - This shouldn't really be an answer as it doesn't really describe a solution to what he wants to do, you have basically described part of my solution and just said it isn't possible to achieve what he wants.... – William Hilsum Oct 3 '09 at 16:02
@Wil, hehe, yes you're right! I guess I got carried away a bit... – Arjan Oct 3 '09 at 16:06
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