Changing your Domain Name Servers
Friday, May 30th, 2008This is a little bit of Web 101. For those of you who know it, great! If not, read on and find out how to change your domain name servers (or DNS).
One of the first things you do before you set up a website is buy a domain name. This domain name serves as the address to your website when you are ready to launch your site. Sounds simple, huh? Well, it is. But before you can launch your domain name to the world, there are steps you need to take in your domain control panel to connect it to your hosting site (which is where your website is.)
Wherever you bought your domain name will be the place you need to go, to log in to your domain name control panel. There, you will need to look for an option called ‘Name Servers’ or ‘DNS’. Once you find this option, you will need to update your name servers to your web hosting company’s name server url. An example of a name server url is ns1.<yourhostingcompany>.com or ns2. <yourhostingcompany>.com. (Your website hosting company will provide you with this information.) Once you submit your new name servers, it will take anywhere from 24 to 72 hours to propagate through the internet. Once this step is completed, all you have to do is enter your domain name into the URL field of your browser and check if your website comes up. If it does, you have successfully changed over your name servers to your new website hosting space.
For those of you who want to read up more about DNS and get a more in depth look at the overall picture of DNS and how it plays into the Internet, here’s an article I found on the ‘How Stuff Works‘ website.