July 31, 2010

Hosting, Domains & DNS

Hosting and Domains are sometimes confused. Think of your domain as your house and the host is the land where you will put the house. You can have a domain without a host but there are more effective ways to use the domain such as parking. More on Pay-per-click, Parking Domians and Affiliate Programs

Some hosting companies offer both domain registration and hosting as a package. The upsides to this approch is that you have very little to set on your own. The hosting company sets up the dns for you to point to your domain name.

If you buy your hosting separate from your domain you will have to ask for your IP address (these come in pairs and are normally sequentional) if you choose to set up custom namesevers. You can use the the hosting company's nameservers and they will look something like n1.yourhostname.com & ns2.yourhostname.com.

If you have your IP addresses or nameservers you need to head into your domain name's Control panel (at your registar) Look for the area that says DNS.

When you click on DNS look for the link that says custom DNS or Create DNS or Manage Name Servers or something along those lines. Managing is creating the names that tie you nameservers to the hosting account kind of like a street address. Click one of those and you should see 2 boxes to fill in one for the name of the IP address and one for the IP address . See Image below:

Create two namesevers and then click back to the domain name dns and look for setup dns link.

Don't get confused :) Remember you just Managed your name servers now were are assigning those names you created to the atcual domain name.

After you have updated and saved your new settings the dns propogation will take affect (typically) in the next 24 hours.