DNS Settings Demystified
Posted by Martin | Tagged as: The Basics, The Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online
Part 6: DNS Settings – making your domain and your hosting account work together.
Having bought both a domain name and a hosting account, the next step of the process is to connect the two together.
That entails changing the domain’s DNS setting.
Whoa! Is that techie jargon creeping in?
A bit – but let me explain.
When you type a website URL into a browser, you use an address like http://www.kickstartdaily.com
That’s a nice, easy to use URL that we humans can understand, but computers work a bit differently. They prefer to look stuff up in databases.
So when you type that URL and click on enter, your browser sends a message to a special computer called a nameserver that looks up kickstartdaily.com and tells where on the Internet it can be found.
When you first buy a domain, from GoDaddy or anyone else, it’s nameserver is set to point to a holding page on the domain registrar’s server, but that’s not much good to us. We want to point our domain name to our own hosting account.
When you buy a hosting account, the company (Hostgator, in the case of today’s example) sends you an email giving you their nameserver address.
It will look something like ns322.somename.com
Make a note of it because you now have to go back to your domain registrar (GoDaddy or Namecheap or whoever you registered your domain with) and plug that new nameserver address in.
This is one of those things that is dead easy to show you, but complicated to describe in text. So here is a fast 3 minute video: http://www.keywordlsispy.com/imkickstart/video3/
This video shows the process at GoDaddy – but all domain registrars are similar.
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Hi Martin,
Thanks SOOO much for all the incredible information you’ve shared here in all of the posts to date and beyond. For the first time I GET IT about some of the technical aspects, such as this particular post about DNS settings. It’s really quite simple, and yet you’re the first person who has explained in such a way as not to overcomplicate the simplicity (the way I did to that sentence!). Thank you, thank you, thank you! I have already recommended your IMKickstart course to a few people. It’s truly one of the best, if not THE best “beginner’s manual” I’ve ever seen on the internet. You’re brilliant!
Gratefully yours,
Beth