Knowledge Base

Customer Portal - Domains

Critical Note: As of December 1, 2016, all ICANN-accredited registrars are required to send a Change of Registrant email to protect your domain from theft when certain changes are made to your domain, regardless of whether or not the domain is changing ownership. Because of this, additional confirmation will be required when making any of the changes to your HostGator domain:

When changing the first, last, or company name in your WHOIS information
When changing your Registrant email address
When disabling domain privacy

When making any of the above changes, you will be offered the opportunity to lock your domain to prevent transfer for 60 days following the change. This will need to be done prior to saving your changes. If you are updating your information to transfer your domain, No must be selected.

ICANN requires that the Change of Registrant email be sent to both the old Registrant email address and the new Registrant email address (if you did not change your Registrant email address, these would be the same address). To complete any changes to your domain, you must confirm BOTH Change of Registrant emails, even if they are the same email address.

Once you have confirmed BOTH Change of Registrant emails, please allow 24 hours for the change to your domain's WHOIS information to complete.

If you no longer have access to your previous Registrant email address to confirm the change to your domain, please contact us for assistance.

How to manage your domains

At HostGator, you should be able to directly manage your domains from LaunchPad and eNom via the Domains section in your Customer Portal. This section provides you the ability to do the following actions on your domain.

View your domains ⤵
Edit your contact information ⤵
Manage domain privacy ⤵
Manage domain locking ⤵
Update name servers ⤵

We have a lot of great information in this article, but if you'd like it streamlined, check out our go-to article about domain management, Domain How-To's.

View your domains

To view your domains within the Customer Portal:

Log in to your Customer Portal.
Click Domains from the left-side menu.
This will display the Domains section, where you'll see the domains you've registered and transferred to HostGator and their status.
Click Settings on the far right to view the Domain Overview.

In the Domains Section, you will see the following details.
- Status
- Renewal Settings
- Contacts
- Domain Connections
- Domain Contacts
- Transfer or Move Domain
- Advanced Tools

Edit domain contact information

Your contact information is used to verify ownership of your domain, so it is important to ensure it is up to date and accurate. More information about WHOIS and the importance of keeping your contact information up-to-date can be found in the article Updating WHOIS Information.

To update your domain's contact information:

Click the EDIT link under the Domain Contacts section.
In the Contact Info section, click the tabs to edit your OWNER, ADMIN, or TECH details.
Once done, make sure to double-check your details for accuracy. Click SAVE to confirm the changes.

Note: As mentioned in the Critical Note above, additional confirmation is required when making certain changes in your Registrant information. Please check your Registrant email address for any notification email.

Manage domain privacy

While it is important to keep your WHOIS or domain registration details valid and up-to-date, you should also keep your contact information private from prying eyes. Domain privacy does that for you. For more information about domain privacy, please visit the article How to Enable Domain Privacy.

To manage your domain privacy:

Under the Domain Overview section, look for the Privacy status, then click the Turn on link.
Select Private to enable Domain Privacy or Public to disable it.
Changes will automatically save.

Manage domain locking

If you wish to lock all your domains at once to ensure that they cannot be transferred without your consent, you may toggle the Domain Locked to lock or unlock the domain. For more information, please check the article How To Unlock a Domain.

To manage your domain's lock status:

Within the Transfer or Move Domain section, look for Domain Locked.
Toggle the lock button to Locking ON or Locking OFF.
The changes will autosave

Update name servers

For your website and emails to work, you need to connect your domain to your hosting account. To do that, you need to update your domain's name servers within your Customer Portal. Here is an article to help you manage your name servers How Do I Change My DNS or Name Servers?

To update the name servers within your Customer Portal:

Within the Advanced Tools section, click the Manage link beside Nameservers (DNS).
The Manage Namservers (DNS) pop-up window will open. Click CONTINUE.
Type the new nameservers in the Nameserver 1 and Nameserver 2 fields.
Click SAVE.

We have compiled our most popular domain-related articles into different series.

Domain Overview - Here is our consolidated guide of domain-related articles.
Domain How-To's - You may visit our go-to articles for domain management.
Domain Concepts - Learn more about domains and what you can do with them!
Domain Troubleshooting - This is the ultimate guide to troubleshooting common domain-related website issues.

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