Make a Website Great

After you’ve registered a domain name and set up your hosting account, the next step is to make the domain name point to your hosting account, otherwise when a domain name is typed into a browser, what comes up, won’t be your site.

When someone types your domain name into a Web browser’s address bar, expecting some Web page to come up, what actually happens next is as follows:

1. The browser looks up the Internet address (also known as Internet Protocol address or, IP address) of the computer server that has your website, i.e. the computer you have your Web hosting account on. This is called DNS (domain name server) lookup, but more on that later.
2. Using the IP address, which is numeric, the browser contacts your Web server, and requests the page that matches what was typed into the browser’s address bar. The request is made using the famous hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP).
3. The Web server contacts browser and sends it the appropriate data that makes up the Web page.
4. The browser takes that data and renders the page.

What we need to concern ourselves with here is the first step. Once that’s set up, all the rest is taken care of by the browser and Web server automatically.

The question we should be asking now is the following: Given a domain name, how does the browser know the IP address of the Web server? And the answer is that it does so by looking it up using domain name servers. A domain name server (DNS) is a computer that serves up a look-up table that matches domain names with IP addresses.

And to make everything work, all you need to do is tell your domain name registrar the name of the DNS of your hosting company.

After you’ve signed up with a Web hosting company, you should have received an email message detailing the DNS information. And you should have been provided with the names of a minimum of two domain name servers, one primary and one backup. Your domain name servers should typically be named something like ns1.SomeDomain.com and ns2.SomeDomain.com. (Domain names are not case sensitive, by the way.)

Now that you have the names of your domain name servers handy, I’ll show you how to set up your GoDaddy domain name registration account to use those. If you didn’t register your domain name with GoDaddy, the principles are similar but the specifics are obviously different for your registrar.

Log into your GoDaddy account and go to the Domain Manager. One way of doing this is by using the menu option on the left sidebar:



The domain manager will display a list of all your registered domains. Now, using the check boxes, select the domain(s) you’d like to set the name servers for:



After you’ve made your selection, click on the “Nameservers” icon, which is located on the toolbar just above the domain name list:


Next, a screen will come up letting you enter your DNS information (click image to enlarge):



Select the “I host my domains with another provider” option, enter your domain servers in the appropriate fields, click “OK“, and you’re done.

One last thing you should know is that DNS changes are not instantaneous. They may take up to 48 hours to propagate throughout DNS machines scattered across the Internet so that every person in the World can access your site.

Once the DNS updates for your Internet point of access, you’ll notice your domain no longer shows an ugly parked domain page full of links and ads, but instead it either shows some default page in your Web hosting account or gives some “page not found” message.

It’s a bit of a downer that you have to wait up to 48 hours to see your site when you type your domain into a browser. Luckily, there is a way to make that happen immediately, but for your computer alone.

Every computer has its own local domain name table called a hosts file. In the next post I’ll show you how to edit that file so that you can access your website and start working on it immediately after registering a domain and setting up hosting.