A domain pointer is simply a domain (or sub domain) that is assigned to your hosting package.

For example, you can assign both example-name.com and www.example-name.com to your hosting package so visitors will see your website whether or not the prepend the www in front of your domain. Similarly if you wanted to assign multiple extensions of your domain you could assign domain pointers for the .com, .net and .us.com.

A directory pointer will allow you to assign domains to a sub-directory within your hosting package so that different domain names can display different websites.

For example, if you wanted your external visitors to use domain-name.com and your internal users to use domain-name.net you could assign the .com domain to /htdocs and the .net domain to /htdocs/internal

You would then upload your external website files to /htdocs and your internal website files to /htdocs/internal

This way you can have seperate websites and visitors will not be aware that the files are located in a subdirectory.

For more information on assigning domains to your hosting package visit:

http://www.webhostinguserguide.com/08-assi...ain_hosting.htm

See the hosting comparision chart for details on the number of domain and directory pointers avaialble for each level of hosting:

http://www.networksolutions.com/web-hostin...-comparison.jsp