Getting Started with Hosting
This guide will take you through the first steps of getting a website and emails online.
Get a domain and hosting.
To have a website and emails you need two things:
- A Domain name, which is a unique name like 'google.com' or 'digitalpacific.com.au'.
- Hosting, or somewhere on the internet where you can store a website and emails.
Link your Domain to your Hosting account
This is usually done by default if you have both your Domain and your Hosting with the same company. If so, you can move onto the next step. However, if you've already registered your domain with different companies, you can still use the hosting - you'll just need to change some records around first.
Expand
If you have your Hosting with us but your Domain with another company:
Option 1 - Find the Nameservers of our hosting by using this guide. Log into your external host and change the Nameservers of your domain to point to our Nameservers. As an example, our guide on doing this can be found here.
Option 2 - Alternatively, if you'd prefer to have us change your Nameservers and manage your domain for you, you could also transfer the domain to us.
Option 3 - If you already had some records in place on external Nameservers, you could also reach out to us to find the IP address associated with your hosting account, then add it onto your external DNS manager. This is not recommended, as our support team will not be able to assist if something does go wrong with your records.
Any of these options will result in your site/emails loading from our servers.
If you have your Domain with us but have Hosting with another company:
Option 1 - Contact the other company and ask for their Nameservers. As an example of what you're looking for, ours can be found here. You can then change your Domain's Nameservers to point there instead:
How to update Nameservers
Option 2 - If your external hosting doesn't have Nameservers, they might ask you to set up other DNS records on our end instead. In this case, you can use this guide to do so:
How to set up DNS manager
Both of these options will result in your site/emails loading from an external host, while keeping your domain with us.
What's the difference between the two methods?
For an introduction to DNS records, you can read this quick post: Understanding DNS in less than 10 minutes.
The Nameserver records attached to a domain determine where other computers will look for the DNS records of your Domain. By default, a domain registered with us will use our Nameservers, so computers will query our records if they want to see where to find your website, or where to deliver emails for your domain.
By changing the Nameservers, we can have them check for records on an external host instead. This is more helpful if you want to manage websites/emails on another host, as the other host will then be able to manage and make changes to your records if needed. Changing Nameservers is often useful when dealing with an external email provider, as they can add the email authentication records themselves instead of asking you to copy the records across to our end.
We have an easy guide on logging into your hosting, which you can find here:
How to access your hosting account
Create a basic website
Many people use Wordpress, an easy-to-use website development tool. You can follow this guide to get a website set up in a few simple clicks:
How to install Wordpress using Softaculous
If you'd prefer to use another Content Management System, we also have other guides which you can find here:
How to install a CMS using Softaculous
Set up email accounts
You can easily set up a few email accounts using this guide:
Create an Email Account
You can them
access them via Webmail (through a browser) or set up emails on your computer or phone:
Email Setup Guides
If you wanted to take advantage of the benefits of Microsoft Office or Google Mail, you could also consider getting
Office 365 or
GSuite for your new domain.
