How to Link a Domain Name to Your Web Host (or Website)

You have a domain name.

You have web hosting.

You want to “connect” or point your domain name to your web hosting account. And then start building your website.

Neat.

We’ll see how to do that in this article.

Just one small digression though. I sometimes see beginners asking on forums whether they need web hosting in order to create a website. Some of them tend to think that a domain name is all that is needed for a website. Let’s clear the confusion before we venture ahead.

Well, you do need web hosting. Your website is in reality a collection of web pages (or files). In order to keep these website files and make them accessible to anyone on the internet, you need space on a web server. A web server is a powerful computer that is connected to the internet 24×7 often through high bandwidth infrastructure. This space on a web server is provided to you by web hosting companies.

A domain name is just a name, nothing more.

However, there are free blogging and other services like wordpress.com, Tumblr and Blogger that allow you to create a blog or a site on their own web servers. Usually the web address for such a site looks like yourname.wordpress.com (replace ‘wordpress’ by the service’s name).

Some of these services also allow you to buy your own domain name (that looks like yourname.com) and point it to your already existing website on their servers (sometimes for a fee). Each of these services usually has its own tutorial telling you how to do this and so we won’t be covering them here.

What we will be covering here is this scenario:

You have a bought web hosting – it doesn’t matter from which web hosting company – it could be Hostgator, BlueHost, GoDaddy, GoMommy or XYZ. And you want to setup a website (like a self-hosted wordpress blog) on that web host for a domain name you already own. And you want to point that domain name to your web host servers.

Cool?

Great.

There are two ways to accomplish this. You only need to do ONE of them to make it work. You can’t and shouldn’t try to do both, in case you are wondering.

In your domain name settings, you should either:

1. Change the nameservers from the one provided by your domain registrar to the one that your web host provides. OR
2. Leave the nameservers untouched, but change what are called as ‘A’ records. These records specify the IP address of the web server on which your website resides. In other words, the IP address of the server provided to you by the web host.

We’ll tackle both approaches below.

First, let’s see what a nameserver or an IP address looks like. This will help you recognize them when you when you see them.

A nameserver looks like this:

ns1.webhost.com

There is a ‘ns’ followed by some number. That’s followed by a “something.com”. Most web hosts provide just 2 of these to you. Some might provide more. Anything more than 2 is optional.

An IP address looks like this:

212.108.118.12

That’s four numbers separated by dots. Each number can be up to three digits.

Updating the nameservers is slightly easier and less prone to mistakes. You might want to work with the IP address only if you have trouble using the nameservers.

Now, let’s see how to find this information for your web hosting account.

Step 1: Finding the Nameservers or the Server IP address For Your Web Hosting

There are three easy ways to find these details.

1) Ask Tech Support: The easiest way to find the nameservers (or the server IP address) is to ask your web host’s tech support team. Just tell them “I’d like to know the nameservers (or the server’s IP address) for my web hosting account” and you should have your answer.

2) Welcome Email: Fish out the welcome email sent to you from your web hosting company. In almost all cases, this email would contain all the important details regarding your web hosting account including the nameservers.

For example, if you signed up with Hostgator (which is where this site, makeawebsite.tv, is hosted), you’d have received an email like the following.

Note the nameservers mentioned towards the end. Some hosts mention the IP address of the server that is allotted to your web hosting account.

3) Web Host Control Panel (cPanel/Plesk): Log into your web host’s control panel. (You should be able to find the username and password for your control panel in the welcome email.)

Once logged in, look for some section that shows your account details. For example, Hostgator’s cPanel looks like the following.

In the lower left corner, there is a section that shows all the account details. Both the nameservers as well as the server IP address is visible here.

Step 2: Login to Your Domain Registrar Account

The next thing to do is login to your domain name account (not your web hosting account).

Every registrar has a section or a page where you get to see all the domains you own with that registrar. Some examples of names this page could be called are ‘Domains‘, ‘Manage Domains‘ or ‘Domain Central‘.

From here, find the domain name that you want to point to your web hosting. In order to access the domain name’s settings, you might have to click on the domain name in question or maybe expand a tab next to it. It’s different with different registrars.

With Namecheap, the folks whom I buy my domains from, the domain management section can be reached by clicking on ‘Manage Domains‘. Once there, all the domain names are listed and clicking on any of the domains takes me to its settings page.

Step 3: Change the Nameservers or the Server IP Address

As said above, only one of these needs to be updated. You already have the information you need for this from step 1. Keep it handy.

Changing the Nameservers

Inside your domain name settings, find a setting that allows you to change or update your nameservers. It could be simply called ‘nameservers’ or it could be explicitly called as something like ‘update nameservers’.

If you click on it, you might see two options under this. One would be to allow the registrar to use the default (in other words, the registrar’s own nameservers). The other would be to specify different (or your own) nameservers.

Since you want to specify our own nameservers (the ones given to you by your web host), choose the second option.

Now paste the nameservers you have from step 1, one in each line provided, starting from the first. Only two nameservers are mandatory. So if your domain registrar allows you to enter more nameservers but you have only two, that’s fine. At the same time, if your domain registrar allows you to enter only two name servers and you have more than two, that’s fine too – just enter the first two in to your domain’s settings and leave the rest.

Once you do this, you are done updating your name servers. Remember to save your settings before you log out.

Changing the IP Address (‘A’ records)

Updating the IP Address (the ‘A’ records) is slightly more challenging compared to the updating of nameservers. This is especially so because different domain registrars provide different ways of setting the ‘A’ records.

First thing to note though is, this option of you being able to set the ‘A’ records yourself is enabled (in your domain name’s control panel) only if you use the default name servers of the domain registrar. In other words, you shouldn’t have set the domain’s nameservers to be those provided by your web host (like discussed above in “Changing the Nameservers“).

Some provide this option under ‘DNS Settings’ while others provide it under, say ‘Host Records’. Some others hide it under ‘Advanced Settings’ under any of the many variations.

So the one thing to understand is you are trying to set a type of record known as ‘A’ records (there are other types of records as well but they aren’t required at the moment) and these records as part of the DNS settings for your domain. Accordingly search your domain name options till you find a place where you can set them.

If you are not able to locate it, you should probably seek help from your domain registrar’s tech support team. You can ask them “where in your control panel can you set the ‘A’ records for a domain name”.

That, or you could simply send them the server IP Address given to you by your web host over a support ticket and then ask them to point your domain name to that IP Address. Many domain registrars would be glad to do it for you.

If you happen to use Namecheap, the following is how to find the place where you can setup your ‘A’ records. Even in you don’t use Namecheap, the following should give you an idea of how to do it for your registrar.

Go to Domains -> Manage Domains. Then click on the domain name that you want to setup.

Amongst the options on the left side, you’ll find a section for Host Management. You need to access All Host Records under that.

Here, you see the following:

You only need to bother about the first two lines at the top. Below that is the Sub-Domain Settings and we’ll come to that in a moment. And then there are the Mail and SRV settings, both of which you can safely ignore now.

In the first line, which has the ‘@’ symbol under the Host Name, paste the server IP Address (from step 1) under the IP Adress/URL column. And then choose ‘A (Address)’ in the drop down in the Record Type column. Again, there are many different types of records in the drop down, but stay assured that they are not needed for this process of mapping your domain name to your website.  You don’t have to fill anything in the TTL column as a default valid value would be automatically used if you leave this blank.

Now, do the same thing (exactly the same thing) for the next row that has ‘www’ in the Host Name column. Doing this would make sure that whether people prefix your domain name with a “www.” or not, they’ll still end up at your website.

Technically, we are done but I’ll briefly cover the sub-domain settings too. If you plan to host a different website at a sub-domain of your website – like if you want to create a site on news.yourdomain.com – then you could use this sub-domain settings to make sure that you point the sub-domain to your web host’s servers as well. Of course, you’ll have to set up a site on a sub-domain at your web host’s end just as you do for your primary domain name (yourdomain.com).

If you wanted that to happen, then you’d type in the sub-domain in under the Host Name column and then fill in the other two columns just as we did above for ‘@’ and ‘www’.

Once you are done with this, your work is over. Be sure to save the settings so that they can take effect.

What Next?

Once you have either updated your nameservers or your server IP address on your domain’s control panel, it’s time for you to wait.

Most domain registrars ask you to wait for a maximum of 72 hours before this connection starts working. However, that is only an upper-limit. In most cases you can expect it to start working within 3 or 4 hours. Sometimes it can take as little as half an hour or less.

Once the “connection” or the “pointing-to” has taken effect, you will be able to see your website when you try to access it via your browser. Of course, if you are just creating a brand new website, you would not have an active website. There might be just a place holder type of page. It could look like the following:

On Hostgator, which is where I host this site, when you point your domain name to their servers for your primary domain with the host (that is, the domain name you gave the web host while signing up), you’d see a page like the following:

This page would go once you login to your web hosting control panel and start building a website on the primary domain.

If you can see either of these pages, you’d gotten the connection working! Everything is all right. Life is beautiful.

Hope you enjoyed this article. Don’t forget to share it. If you have any comments or questions, let me know in the comments section.