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Setting Up Your Domain

 

If you purchased your domain together with your hosting package, your domain should come pre-configured to point to your hosting package. If not, you will need to point your domain to your server to display your site.

Please Note: If you are transferring an existing site to a new hosting account, the DNS change needs to happen after the content of the site has been moved over, not before. This is so that site visitors can continue to see the website while it is being transferred. When starting a new site, then the DNS needs to be changed first so people can see the new site sooner.

The steps you need to follow depend on where you bought your domain:

Important Note: Once your name servers have been updated, there will be 24-48 hours of DNS propagation time during which your website and email may not be available.

Domains Purchased From HostGator

If you purchased your domain from HostGator and wish to point it to your HostGator hosting package, you can use the following link this guide to correctly point your domain and manage your HostGator domain:

Domains Purchased Elsewhere

If you purchased your domain with a third party, you may be interested in transferring your domain to HostGator in order to keep management for both your domain and your hosting in the same place.

For information about transferring your domain, please see our following article:

Otherwise, you will need to use the name servers in your welcome email to point your domain to HostGator from your current registrar. The following article will provide additional information about updating your DNS:

HostGator offers tutorials to assist with this for many different registrars:

Accessing Your Account After Configuring Your Domain

After the domain name has been propagated to the correct DNS records and server, you will be able to use domain-based URLs to access the various parts of the hosting account.

cPanel URL

To access the cPanel on a hosting account, please refer to the following article:

Webmail URL

To access webmail for a hosting account, please refer to the following article:

Website URL

To access your website, simply use the domain name. It should look like the following:

http://yourdomain.TLD
Please note that yourdomain.TLD should be your domain name that you purchased such as hostgator.com, etc. If you have not purchased a domain name, then your hosting account will not work properly. In order to purchase a domain, please go to http://hostgator.com/domains or contact our Billing department via phone or Live Chat.

Purchasing New Domains

If you're interested in purchasing additional domains for your website, the following the process is simple. You can purchase directly from our domain registration portal, or read our articles about helpful practices when purchasing a domain:

Shared Hosting Startup Guide