Connect Domain Provider to Your Host

On By joseph
Time to read: 3 minutes

So, now you are happy that you have your website ready to be deployed to the public, you want to get your domain and server and get things live, but how? how to connect domain provider to your host?

How do we do so?

First, what is the difference between a domain provider and a host?

Domain Provider

A domain provider is the one who sells you your domain, AKA, your www.your-great-site-name.com, of course you can buy any extension you want as long as it’s there and available

  • .com
  • .net
  • .org
  • .xyz
  • .gg
  • .me // like mine 🤭🤭
  • … and the list goes on

Host

A host, a server provider, or a hosting service, is the one who hosts and serves your content, the one who rents you the server and gives you an IP, like my IP here is 104.248.29.209

Prices

Well, of course it varies and there are a lot of prices and options, but a good option to start with is getting your domain from something like:

It can be around 10$/year for a domain name with .com extension

And you can also get your host from something like:

And it can be around 2$ to 5$/month, also of course based on your configuration and server power, is it shared or private … etc, but 2$ to 5$ / month is a good server to start with.

Alternative

If you don’t wanna go with all the below hassle (which is, by the way, not so hard) you can get your domain and server from the same provider like:

Connect Domain Provider to Your Host

So how to do that basically?

There’re some things we need to know:

  • Domain
    • That’s your website URL or path or name, which is something like this
    • www.whatever-your-name-is.com
  • Server
    • This is where your content lives
  • DNS
    • This is a big table that says what each domain maps to which IP
    • like: https://josepham.me maps to 104.248.29.209

So, we basically have to do two steps, ONLY TWO STEPS and we are live 😎🚀

The Domain Provider

We need to go to your domain provider, let’s say NameCheap

  • Go to NameCheap
  • Login to your account
  • Click to your domain that you purchased
  • Click on configure or settings or manage
  • You will find a section called “Nameservers”
  • Select custom DNS
  • Start adding your DNS server names
    • How to know those? each hosting provider has their own name servers, for example, DigitalOcean has those ones
    • ns1.digitalocean.com
    • ns2.digitalocean.com
    • ns3.digitalocean.com

It will look like this

The Hosting Provider

Now, you added the nameservers to your domain provider, it’s time to map your server with your domain? How?

We go to our server/hosting provider, in our case, DigitalOcean

  • Go to DigitalOcean
  • Login to your account
  • In the dashboard, click on Networking
  • Click on Domains
  • Add your domain // josepham.me
  • Click Add Domain

You should find this:

Now, we need to add two new records:

  • A
  • CNAME

The A Record is your main website URL, which in our case is, josepham.me

The CNAME is an alternative name of your domain, in this case, any subdomain, like www.

So, www.josepham.me is a CNAME of josepham.me

So, here we need to add the www in the CNAME to finally look like this:

a record
cname record
final records

Once all your records are added, it may take 2-3 mins to reflect in the global DNS and your Domain map to your IP 😎🚀🚀🚀

And Thats’ It ! That’s pretty much how to Connect Domain Provider to Your Host !!

it's alive !
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