This is a pretty common thing to do, right? You have hosting at Go Daddy but your domain is registered with someone else, like Name Cheap. You’d think this would be a well-documented, straightforward thing to do. But, as I found out, it isn’t.
If you do a Google search on this, you are likely to come up with a Go Daddy help page which is very misleading. It seems to apply to this situation, but is actually is for the case when both your hosting and domain are offsite (why you would still use Go Daddy to administer in that case is beyond me). Don’t use these Go Daddy instructions!
I’ll show you the right way to do it here. The first thing you need to do is go to the Go Daddy website and log into “My Account”:
From there, click “Web Hosting”, and click “Launch” for the hosting account that you want to use for this domain:
Scroll down a bit and click on “Hosted Domains”.
You should see all of your domains. The next trick is to click the “Add Domain” button in the upper right corner. Enter the domain name, such as “mysite.com”, then the sub directory of your root that you want the domain to point to, such as “/mysite”. Click “OK” and go do something else for an hour or so while the domain gets set up.
When the status says “Setup”, it is ready to go. Hover over the “More” tab at the top of the Domain Management page and click “DNS Manager”.
Look at the top-ish part of the page to see what domain this is referring to. If it’s the domain you’re working on, then fine. If not, click the “change zone” link which is just to the right of “Zone File Editor”. It is a bit hard to find. A popup should appear. Click on the domain name that you’re working on.
Now, go to the bottom table that is titled “NS (Nameserver)”. This is where the action is. Note the two name servers under the “Points to” column. For example, they might say:
ns09.domaincontrol.com
ns10.domaincontrol.com
Disregard the word “Informational” in parenthesis next to the names. Note these two name servers (yours might be different from what I have here!) or just leave this window up and open a new browser window.
In the new browser window, go to your domain name registrar. You’ll need to log in and set (or change) the name servers to the two name servers from the Go Daddy site. Here is a handy video on how to do it for Namecheap.
Wait a little while for the name to propagate. It might take over an hour. But, keep checking – this will work!
Hope this has been helpful!
- Brian