“How do I point my domain from GoDaddy to a name server?”
Okay, So you’ve purchased a new domain name, now what? Well if you’re someone who is going for the least expensive way to start your online business, then you’ve decided to use Godaddy for your registrar and for buying domain names. You’ve also decided to use Hostgator for your web hosting. But how do you connect your domain name at Godaddy to your new web site at Hostgator? Today we will review how some of this works and show you how change your DNS settings at Godaddy so Hostgator can serve up a web page for you.
Domain Registrar
Godaddy is a domain name registrar. They are a company that manages domains names that are used on the Internet. They do other things but really the best thing they do is domain names, and they do it great. When you buy a domain name you also usually will get some sort of DNS hosting as part of the service for using that registrar. But what is DNS? I’m glad you asked 
DNS (Domain Naming Systen)
So to start telling what DNS is, I need to make sure you understand a little bit about how the Internet works and how DNS works.
All computers that are on the Internet have an address. Just like your home has a mailing address and zip code to allow the post office to deliver mail, computers have an address too. This address is called an IP address. IP (like all things in the techy world is an acronym that stands for Internet Protocol) IP addresses are a long series of numbers. Like the way the post office uses zip codes to route your mail across the country, computers use IP addresses to route your data across the Internet.
For us humans, its not too easy for us to remember long strings of numbers. That’s why we use names instead. Back to our post office example, my friend Bob lives on Elm Street, in Chicago. I can remember Bob’s address easily because of its name. The post office however uses the zip code to find Bob.
The internet is the same way. Human use names and computers use numbers to find what we’re looking for. For example, google.com is the name of the search engine Google. When you want to find Google you type in the name (http://www.google.com) in your browser window. That name, google.com is actually an IP address (a long series of numbers) that is used to route your request across the internet.
To do all of this conversion from names to numbers, computer use a system called DNS or the Domain Naming System. DNS servers all over the world take names and convert them to ip addresses. As you know, a domain name like google.com is simply a name given to the physical address of Google’s web servers on the internet.
After you buy your domain name, the first thing you want to do is change the DNS setting to point to your hosting provider. To do this, simply log in to your Godaddy account and click on Manage Domains. From here you will be given a list a domain names that are currently associated with your account.
From the list of domain names click on the domain name you wish to change. This will take you to the domain name properties page. Here you can change your contact details along with the dns server settings.
In the lower left hand side of the page you will see a link called Manage DNS. Click on this link to reveal a pop-up window with several options for changing your DNS. The option we are interested in is the “I have specific name servers for my domain”. Select this option and several text boxes will appear that allow you to input your DNS server settings. Don’t worry if you only have two name servers and there are four boxes. Just add one server name to each text box and leave the other blank.
When you first signed up for your hosting account Hostgator or Blue host would have sent you a welcome email. This email should have included your user name, password and your DNS server names. You need to copy the DNS server names from this email and input them into the DNS text boxes on your Godaddy domain account page.
After you add your DNS servers, select okay and your done. One finaly word about DNS servers. They are sometimes slow to propagate their changes throughout the Internet. DNS changes can take up to three hours, sometime up to 3 days or longer. It’s usually doesn’t take that long, but every once in a while is does. So if you’ve made changes to your DNS and you don’t see things updating, be patient. If after several hours, things still don’t look good, then give Godaddy tech support a call. They are very helpful with domain name support.
Hopefully this article has helped. If you have any questions about how DNS works or need help finding a recommend web hosting provider, leave a comment below.
