Have you ever bought a domain name from a separate service than your web hosting company? Well, the process to connect the two together can be quite challenging for first timers. Today you’ll learn how exactly to perform that task, hopefully with as little difficulty as possible.
Like most webmasters, your first choice will probably be to visit GoDaddy.com to buy your domain. Why? Because they’re the Wal-Mart of domain registrars. They supply everything, from domains, to subdomains, to email servers, and you can even opt-in for their web hosting package. Plus, they have a 24 hour tech support on duty to handle any of the issues you might have.
When you purchase your hosting plan, odds are that you’ll be asked what domain you want to use. Some web hosts let you modify this later, and some don’t. So, try and get it right the first time. Once you’ve done this, the web hosting company will feed your website to any computer that asks the web server for that specific domain.
After you purchase your domain, you’ll want to configure it’s nameservers. The first thing you’ll want to do is find your hosting company’s nameserver addresses. These will typically look like “NS01.HOSTINGCOMPANY.COM”. Write those down (at least 2 of them), and visit the site you bought your domain from. If you’re using GoDaddy, there’s a big box that says “nameservers” in your domain’s dashboard. Click on it. In the box that appears, select the option “I have specific nameservers for my domains”. Once you’ve done that, fill in the blanks under “Nameserver 1″ and “Nameserver 2″. They can be in any order, and you have to configure at least two of them.
Once configured, the process goes like this. You have a visitor, let’s call him “Tim”, and he wants to visit your website called “stuff4tim.com”. When Tim types your website in his address bar, his browser will contact an internet server and ask where “stuff4tim.com” is. The internet server will tell the browser the nameserver to contact. When the browser asks the nameserver where the site is, the nameserver will connect Tim’s browser to your website, wherever it might be on your hosting company’s server.
Hopefully by the end of this rather short tutorial, anyone will be able to visit your website by typing in your domain no matter what their name is. Remember that with some registrars, the time it takes to update the main internet servers can be up to 12 hours. So just sit back, relax, and wait for it to process.
