Home Based Internet Marketing Businesses - Step 3 - Linking Domains and Hosting

As you can imagine, communication is very important with home based internet marketing businesses. Once you have your domain name and you have set up your web hosting account it is time to get them talking to each other!  You might remember I compared a domain name to a street address and hosting to the PO Box, well now we are making sure the postal carrier knows that this PO Box belongs to your address.

In this article I'll cover how to link the domain name you got with GoDaddy and your web hosting account, through Host Gator. These services are available from other places and the process will be really similar if you want to get the services elsewhere.

You will have received an email from Host Gator with your account information. You are going to need that email to do this step. In the email it will have your domain name and some other details about the account, but the key information you will need for this step is the "name servers". You will have two different name servers that look very similar to this:

"ns1234.hostgator.com" "ns1235.hostgator.com"

The actual numbers between the 'ns' and the '.' will be different, but if you are using Host Gator for you hosting company the rest will be the same. Other companies will follow a very similar format.

You are going to be putting these numbers into your GoDaddy account, so either write them down or print out that email and have it handy.

Now login to your GoDaddy account, or the domain registrar where you bought your domain.

Click on the Domains link.

Next click on My Domains, and find the domain name you want to link to the hosting account.

Click on that domain name and it will take you to a screen where you can information about your domain.

Look for the name servers on this screen. The format will be very similar to the hostgator one. GoDaddy's default name servers are

"NS23.DOMAINCONTROL.COM" "NS24.DOMAINCONTROL.COM"

This is what you are going to be changing.

Look in the tool bar just about the name servers and you will see a link "NameServers", click on that. You will see that your nameservers are currently parked.

Click the radio button by Custom nameservers and boxes will appear showing the default nameservers. This is where you are going to type in the namesservers information you got from Host Gator.

Be sure to type it in exactly as you got it in your email. Don't worry if you type it in lower case and GoDaddy changes it to uppercase.

Click the OK button and then the No Thanks, Set Nameservers button. And one more time, click OK.

This will take you to your name servers page. It will not have updated to the new nameservers yet because it does take a little time for that to take place. Go ahead and log out and when you are next ready to log in you should see the new name servers!

Your home based internet marketing businesses are starting to really take shape! You have your domain name and your hosting account and now they are talking to one another. You are now ready to start building your web pages!