A parked domain is one that's taken, however it's not associated with some other service - web or e mail hosting. To put it differently, such a domain won't load any real content when you type it in an Internet browser, but nobody can take it as you have already registered it and you are its owner. The advantage of obtaining a domain name and parking it afterwards is the fact that you can keep it and not stress that somebody else could possibly register it meanwhile if, for example, the website for it is not ready yet. You are able to create a temporary Under Construction page for a parked domain name while you are working on the web site, or direct it to another web address - temporarily or permanently. The latter option can be employed if you have already registered domain.com, for instance, and you acquire domain.net and domain.org, in order to protect a brand name or a trademark. In this case, the .net and .org domains can be parked and directed to the .com as you do not need individual websites for them.