Domain Name

"Pointing Your Domain Name to Third Party Web Hosting Server"

How to Make Your Website Go 'Live'?

To have your website fully operational on the world wide web, your domain name has to "merge" with the web space (i.e. online storefront) your web hosting provider has allocated for you, like your company name merging with your physical storefront as in the offline world to form an offline business.

This online merging is technically known as pointing domain name to the web hosting server.

There are 2 ways to merge your domain name with the web space, one is through the same company and the other is through different companies.

Let me explain with examples.

The figure below shows that if you register your domain name with the company that also provides you with the web space to host your website, then by default the domain name server (DNS) has already been internally set to point to the web hosting server.

In this case, you don't have to worry about how to make your domain name point to your web hosting server since Company A (as in the figure above) has already handled everything for you.

If however, you register your domain name with Company A but yet host your website with Company B, then you'll have to do a little work to point your domain name from Company A to Company B's web hosting server (as shown below) in order to turn your website 'live'.

Don't worry, this is no difficult task, even an 8-year-old can do, so long as you follow the simple instructions below.

Let's say now you had your domain name registered with Company A, and you had just purchased a web hosting service package (including web space) from Company B.

Now, to point your domain name from Company A to Company B's server, you must first get to know the name servers of Company B which usually look something like this:

NS1.Company_B_DNS.COM
NS2.Company_B_DNS.COM

*For your info, name servers are typically in pairs in case there is a failure with one of them. As such most hosting systems require at least 2 name servers to be entered.

You can easily find those data in your web hosting account, if not you can check with Company B's customer support via email or live chat (if any).

Once you got that data, next step is to log into your domain account residing in Company A and then access the domain control panel to edit the name server in there (see below for example).

Always put them in the space of 1st and 2nd name servers. Then go on to save the settings. That's it. Simple.

Note!

Changes to the settings of a domain take an average of 48 hours to become effective because of the number of networks involved, and because these networks are controlled by several different agencies.

This delay applies to all domains with any domain registrar. So do remember to allow for this delay when you're planning web sites or configuring a domain to work with your services.

Good web hosting company will provide you with detailed instructions based on the different domain registrar you register your domain name with.

I'm just giving you some ideas on how this can be done if you need help in this.

Bonus Tip

Some people asked me, "Why do people choose to manage domain name and website hosting under different companies?"

This is mainly due to the reason of lower pricing of domain registration with another company and also the ease of domain management.

In other words, some web hosts can provide superior web hosting service but their domain pricing and domain control panel suck, so it's not advisable to stick your domain registration with them.

Anyway, changing domain name server (DNS) setting is very easy (as shown earlier), that's why it gives people the power to choose whether they want to have their domain names registered with their web hosting company as well or not.

But of course, if you feel that it's better to have both domain name and website hosting managed by the same company, by all means.