New Blog Help

Once you’ve bought your domain name and purchased hosting for it, you need to be able to get your domain name and your hosting company talking to each other in a process called pointing your domain to your webhost or changing your domain nameservers. If you don’t take this crucial step then your web hosting and your domain name can never become one and you will wonder for the rest of your days why you typed in your domain name in your browser address bar and all you ever saw was an error message. Here’s how you do it:

Shortly after you bought your blog hosting they sent you a welcome email with important information regarding how to access your cPanel, your username and passwords, and some information about your nameservers that looks something like:

Keep that email on hand while you follow these steps to change your nameservers with Godaddy:

1. Log into your Godaddy account
2. Hover over the tab marked “Domains”
3. From the dropdown menu that appears select “My Domains”
4. From there you will be sent to the Godaddy domain manager interface
5. You will now see a listing of all the domain names you own with Godaddy
6. Click on the domain name that you would like to forward the nameservers for

7. Your nameservers are clickable links so click on them to change them
8. A menu drops down and there are three choices: Parked nameservers, Hosting nameservers, and Custom nameservers. Make sure that you select custom nameservers as you will be hosting your blog elsewhere.
9. Now you will see that two Nameserver fields have information in them but we are going to change both of them with the information you received regarding your nameservers from your new web host.
10. Enter your web host’s first and second nameservers in the appropriate fields and once you are done click the OK button

That’s it…you’re done!

Keep in mind though that while it took you two minutes to change your nameservers to your blog host servers, it can take a few hours for that change to take effect in a process known as “propagating”. You will know when it has finished propagating to your new blog host by typing in your domain name in your browser address bar. Once you see some sort of placeholder page from your web host then it is done and your website is now live on the Internet. It shouldn’t take more than 6 to 12 hours for that to happen.

Now you will need to start the process of setting up your blogging platform so that the world will see your blog and not some hosting placeholder when they reach your domain…but that’s in the next lesson.

If you don’t have Godaddy as your domain name registrar then the instructions outlined above will be different depending on your registrar but should be the same general process using your domain manager to change your nameservers.