Domain question
 

Let's say I have a domain registered with namecheap.
This domain used to be hosted on some server and it had a website on it, but now I just want to use the registrar's URL forwarding option to redirect it to some URL.

The thing is, namecheap only allows to redirect http://www.domain.com and http://domain.com

If I type in http://www.domain.com/a/b/c.html for example it adds /a/b/c.html to the URL I'm redirecting to and I don't want this. I want it to always redirect to the same URL, no matter what path I use.

any way I can overcome this using the registrar's URL redirect option and without pointing the DNS to my own server and placing a .htaccess file there?

There's no easy way, You're better off pointing at your own host and using a custom .htaccess, as you described, or copying your old site to the new host.

bump

maybe someone knows how to do this?

just use htaccess to redirect all 404 pages not found to the index page... then put a redirect or 301 on the index page to your new desired location.

and host the domain on a free or really cheap host for a fresh ip

p.s. I'm no tech

I don't know about namecheap, but I used to use some other registrars that had the option to either forward all requests to the root folder OR keep the directory structure intact. It looks like that should be possible with namecheap, but I'm not sure. See if there's anything new here:
http://namecheap.simplekb.com/Themes...7&categoryid=4
http://namecheap.simplekb.com/Themes...4&categoryid=0

When you setup the domain on your server(domain administration) make sure it is setup to redirect(not a regular domain) to the url you want, any request will then be redirected to the url of your choice, no matter what url for that domain is requested.