This is the third step in a series of posts I’m writing that will help you set up your own website, with your own domain.

After you finished the last step and signed up for web hosting, at the end of the process your new web host sent you an e-mail giving you all the details of your new account. It probably included things like your user name, your password, cPanel login information and so on.

Most importantly – for this step anyway – that e-mail probably sent you the nameservers that your host uses. You need to have those nameservers in order to follow this step.

To help you find them in that e-mail, nameservers look like this: ns1.yourdomain.com or ns2.yourdomain.com

You will usually be given two nameservers by your web host to use – the primary (ns1.yourdomain.com) and the secondary (ns2.yourdomain.com).

Once you have those two nameservers, you go to your domain registrar, log into your account and find the domain management screen.

Once you’re at your domain management screen, you should see the domain that you registered. The domain should have the date you registered it and the status of the domain. Right now it’s just sitting there, in much the same manner that a fire doesn’t.

If people go to allenselby.com right now (or your website), before you set the nameservers, they won’t see anything useful at all. In order for people to type in “allenselby.com” into their web browser and get to what I want to show them, I have to point the domain name to the web host.

Think of your web server as an apartment or a rented retail space. Your web host rents that space, collects the money and keeps up the property.

A domain name is an address. Short, catchy addresses are easier to remember than long, complicated addresses.

A nameserver setting is like a phone book listing. It shows people how to get to your retail space.

So what we want to do now is put our nameserver settings into GoDaddy so people will be able to find our website.

All we have to do is click on the box next to the domain name and the nameserver button becomes clickable:

And now you click on the button marked “Nameservers” to go to this screen:

You don’t want to park your domain. Parking a domain means that you’ve registered it, but you’re not doing anything with it. Unless you do something with the domain that you register, like point it at your webhost, GoDaddy will monetize it themselves. They’ll slap some ads on it and hope for regular folks to type in the name of the domain into their browser (which happens with surprising regularity, depending on the domain name) and hopefully click on an ad or two.

Right now, GoDaddy has your domain pointed at their web servers, as you can see here. The current settings are ns29.domaincontrol.com and ns30.domaincontrol.com. This is done automatically when you register the domain, but we’re now going to change the settings to point at your web host’s nameservers.

Once you’ve put your own nameservers (and I guarantee that they’re not ns1.yournameserver.com or ns2.yournameserver.com), click OK. You’ll be taken to this confirmation screen:

You’ll have to wait from a few minutes to a few hours for your nameserver changes to propagate, depending on how busy the world is at the time. GoDaddy is very quick at this, usually. Some domain name registrars can take up to 72 hours, which is another reason why GoDaddy is one of my registrars of choice.

Once the nameserver change propagates, you’ll be able to go to the next step and start putting up your own website.

The Guide:

Building Your Own Website

Registering a Domain Name
Choosing a Web Hosting Company: Hawk Host or Liquid Web
Pointing Your Domain Name to Your Web Host
Using cPanel and Fantastico to Put Up Your First Website
Changing The Default WordPress Settings On Your First Website
Locating, Loading And Activating Useful WordPress Plugins For Your First Website
A List Of Useful WordPress Plugins

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