domains

You need to find out the name and/or ip of the nameservers from whoever you registered the domain with, and then enter that into dreamhost's "use third party" option. If the registrar only has one nameserver, you can just enter that twice.

Woah wait, isnt that backwards? Company X has the domain name, and dreamhost is going to be hosting the site.

Company X had the "Use third party" option, not dreamhost. And I tried putting ns1.dreamhost.com and ns2.dreamhost.com for the 2 nameservers on Company X website, but after 48 hours the URL was still not going anywhere.

It seems like somethings missing. It seems like Im telling my URL to point to dreamhost, but not to a specific website within dreamhost...

It depends on how you want it setup. I tend to keep DNS separate from the hosting company. Right now all of my DNS is setup through GoDaddy and I'm pointing the server IPs to Dreamhost. You just need to configure the DNS entries with whoever your domain registrar has set as the authority for your DNS. Alternatively, you can set Dreamhost to be authority on your DNS and let Dreamhost handle the IP management.

Your registrar should have information on changing who is authority for your DNS entries.

Anyone have any suggestions for a good/pretty reliable registrar?

I'm using Moniker.com currently. Spent a while two years ago trying to find a registrar with full control and a good track record. The service is impeccable - but the UI is getting on my nerves. Just wondering if I'm missing anything new and great.

Quote:

Original post by AndreTheGiant Ok heres a noob question that I should probably know the answer to, but apparently dont. I purchased web hosting from dreamhost, and purchased a domain name from another company X. Now I want the domain name to point to the website at dreamhost. I'm not sure exactly how to do that. I thought I could figure it out but there are so many options! And considering I have to wait about 48 hours after trying something to see if it worked, I figured I better ask here. Theres an option "Use Third Party Hosting", and that sounds right but then it wants to know 2 nameservers and I dont know what they are. Other options are "Park", "Forward Domain", and "Host here" Help please! :)

Park = Domain is owned but not in use, and points nowhere
Forward to domain = Domain re-directs to another domain. You could use this, when you signed up for a dreamhost account, they probably gave you a url like myusername.dreamhost.com. You could set the domain to forward to this, but the URL shown in the browser would then change to mysername.dreamhost etc.
Host Here = would sign you up for a hosting account with your registrar.

The use third party hosting is the option you want, when you signed up for dreamhosting they should have given you nameserver details, enter them here, this means whenever anyone enters a URL, instead of your registrar telling the browser where the site is hosted, it will pass the user onto the specified nameserver, which would then tell people where the site is.

There is also a third option which you didnt mention, which may be available. All a nameserver does is store a number of records for the domain, specifying where each sub-domain should point to (www, ftp, mail are all subdomains). If you selected the "use third party hosting" option, it essentially says that these records will be located on another machine - dreamhosts nameserver.

By default these records are held on the registrars server until you change them, if you look again there should be a DNS settings or similar section. Unfortunately I cant get into my registrars system to check this, but within there you should see a series of records, one for www, one for ftp, one for mail etc. Next to these you add the IP of the machine it is to point to, in all of these cases you would enter the IP of your website. (I cant remember if these need to be "A" records or "CNAME" records, and I cant verify it right now)

However your best bet is to use the third party hosting option and enter a nameserver.

As for the time taken to update any changes, it will take UP TO 48 hours. For a new domain it should be instant. The nameserver system works as a hierarchy, when you enter a URL it is looked up in your ISPs DNS server, if it knows what it is, it redirects you directly to the site. If not, it asks its peers, and so on up the chain, then back down again, until a machine is found that does know where it points. The DNS server will then remember where it points for future requests. Whenever you change the IP a domain points to, it needs to filter back up through the chain, and down again. Domain servers will refresh their list of domains every 24 hours, hence the time for changes to take effect.

Thanks a million, that was very informative and I got it all figured out. I used the '3rd party hosting' option as you said, and gave it the dreamhost nameservers. There was another step that I was missing, and that was to go to dreamhost and tell it to host my url.

Thanks!