How to edit the Name Servers of your Domain Registration Service to point to the Hosting Service?

So you are planning to build a website and buy your domain name from a domain registration service like GoDaddy or NameCheap but your website hosting provider is different. How can you link your Domain Name to your Hosting provider?

In cases where your Domain Name and the hosting provider is from the same service, you wouldn’t have to worry about linking your Domain Name with the Hosting Service since they are from the same service provider, everything is taken care of.

In situations where the place you buy your domain name and the hosting service is different, you would have to somehow let the Hosting Provider know the domain name that you registered for. This can be done by editing the name servers of the Domain Registration Service and then point them to the name services of your Hosting Provider. The Steps below are used for linking Network Solutions (Domain Registration )to Site5 (Hosting Service) but the same steps could be followed for any two providers.

The Steps

1. Go to the list of Domain Names that you have in the Domain Registration Service and Edit the DNS of the one where you need to change the name servers.
2.  Then you would come to a page where you can specify two name servers. At this time look for the name servers of your Hosting Provider and make a note of it. Most of the time you can find out by Googling “Name Server for  GoDaddy” (as an example)
3. Once you get the Name Servers of your hosting provider, enter those name servers in that page and click on Move DNS. In this case, I was planning to move the DNS to Site 5 and their name servers were dns.site5.com and dns2.site5.com
4.  Once done, you would get a message saying that it might take 24-36 hours for the changes to take place.

After this you would have to create appropriate records in your Hosting Service in order to configure your website which I would be explaining in my upcoming blog.

Pointing your Domain to a Web Hosting Provider

In order to build a website, one must first have domain name or a web address to go to. For example in www.yahoo.com, yahoo.com is a domain name. And in http://www.cnn.com/, cnn.com is a domain name. So the Question now is how does one get or obtain a Domain Name? Well, in order to obtain a Domain Name of choice one most go to a Domain Registration Site and check whether the domain is available. In case the Domain is available you could register for it. Once the Domain is registered now one else can take your Domain Name. There are many Domain Registration Sites out there, GoDaddy, Name Cheap, Network Solutions are some of them.

Now once you have registered a Domain, the next step is to host a website. More often than not we choose a different Hosting Provider for a website. We do this for security reasons, that is to separate the place we register a Domain and the place where we host our website. There are again different hosting providers, some of them are Site5,Host Gator.

Once you have chosen a Hosting Provider and got your Domain registered, the next step is to connect the place where you registered your Domain with the Web Hosting Service. This is done so that your Domain Name can get linked to your website. In order to do this you would have to first note the Name Servers in your web Hosting Provider. Then log in to the Domain Registration Service and select the Domain you have registered, modify the DNS settings by adding the Name Servers of your web hosting provider. You would have two fields to fill- Name Server 1 and Name Server 2.

Now you should have the your Domain pointing to your web Hosting Service 🙂