Hey everyone, this is Linkon here with TrendingWP. Today I’m going to show you how to change your Name Servers and point them to your hosting account. Let’s start!
So here we are at portal.hostgator.com. We can log in here to our customer portal using our email address and password. Now let’s go here to the left-hand side and click on the Domains section. Here we can see all the domains that I have registered on my Hostgator account.
Change HostGator DNS (Domain Name Server)
If I want to check out a new one I can do that here at Register a Domain. If I bought a domain somewhere else and I want to transfer the registration to Hostgator, I can click up here on the right-hand side to do it as well. So let’s take a look at the ‘More‘ tab and we can see additional information about this domain.
We’ve got the Status showing that the domain is Active. They sent a verification email to my email address and I clicked ‘Verify‘. I do have Privacy turned off and domain Locking turned on. I see when I registered it, and when it expires.
And I can see here that I have Auto-Renew turned on so this means about 30 days before the domain actually expires a new invoice will pop up on my account so that I can automatically register this domain again. This way I never lose it.
We can see here at the top right-hand side we have our Name Servers and these are the most important part of a domain because they essentially tell the internet where to look for your content. You can think of it as your home address for your domain.
HostGator Default Nameservers
Each plan that you have here with HostGator, whether it’s a Shared account or Reseller or a Cloud. It’s gonna have a different set of Name Servers. When you register a domain right out of the gate we’re always gonna put these default Name Servers ns1.hostgator.com and ns2.hostgator.com. On there which will actually point you to a page and give you more instructions on how to change your Name Servers.
I’ll show you how to do this today, so let’s click on ‘Change.’ Here we have two different options. We can automatically point the domain to a hosting account here. Or we can manually set the Name Servers. I’ll show you how to do it both ways. If you click the option for ‘Automatically point my domain to my hosting account‘ it defaults to the package that you have on your plan.
So I’ve got one here which is a Shared hosting account. Click that and it automatically puts the Name Servers that I need into the Name Server section. Really no need to go and grab anything extra. Once I have that set and I’m sure that’s the right package I click ‘Save‘ and after a few moments, you’ll notice these bars turn green and the domain has essentially been pointed at that time.
Now it will take 24 to 48 hours for your domain to update across the web. That’s called propagation. As soon as you change your Name Servers you may not see the domain take effect immediately. Sometimes it will take a little bit of time. Now that you know how to point it automatically, I’ll show you how to grab your Name Servers in the hosting portal and also inside the cPanel.
How To Get Hosting DNS From cPanel
We’ll go back up here into the Hosting tab and we’ll take a look at some of the accounts that I have. I’ve got two Shared Hosting plans here, one is a Cloud and one is a Shared Business Plan. We’ll click on ‘Manage‘ for the plan that I want to look at. This takes us to a good option overview so I can see the type of plan that it is. When it’s going to renew, the current price. And then up here at the top, if I click this question mark (?) it’s actually going to show me the Name Servers for this account.
Now I can copy this information over if I ever need to set it manually. Let’s go inside the cPanel for it and I’ll show you how you can get your Name Servers there as well. Let’s go back to the dashboard. I’ll scroll down I can see my hosting packages here for the Shared Business account click ‘Launch cPanel’ and this will take you directly to your cPanel back-end.
Now if we scroll down here on the right-hand side, underneath General Information. I can see I have a primary Name Server and a secondary Name Server. So I could take these and copy them in and put them in manually if I wanted to.
Once that is copied over, go back to our Customer Portal into the Domains section, go back down and click ‘More.’ So you can see the Name Server changes have already been made when I automatically pointed it. But if I wanted to set them manually, I could always come in here and paste the ones.
That’s essentially it. Once your domain is pointed to your hosting account then you can start to set up WordPress. Thanks for reading. If you have any questions or comments please post them below. Stay with us if you want to see more helpful content.