Congratulations on taken the plunge! You know, I’ve been acquainted with so many people who delay buying web hosting which simply slows everything down. Anyway, if you’ve bought the domain a few hours back, you need to wait for the information regarding the domain registration to percolate to all the Name Servers in the world.
In layman’s terms, this means that all the computers around the world that hold domain name information need to be told that you have registered that particular domain name.
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This process of updation can take anywhere between 24 to 72 hours. Nowadays, however, I’ve noticed that the time taken for all Name Servers to update is much shorter – about 14-18 hours. Any way, you can be sure that the domain would belong to you in a few hours time, so please be patient; I know we are all very excited when we register our first domain name.
When you purchase a domain name and hosting together from a company, you should get an email from them confirming your order. The company would also send you very sensitive (and important) information in either this email or another one. Here are the things you should be looking out for:
- Important: Username and password of your account through which you can administer your domain name.
- Important: Username and password of the web hosting server. These might be the same as the login details above.
- Important: The server details such as the server name, server I.P. address, name server information etc.
- Not very important: A temporary URL of your web site. This is not essential because some companies do not supply this information. No need to fret. You can contact them if you want to know; else, just wait for a few hours and your web site would be online with a placeholder home page.
- Important: URL to the control panel for your web hosting package. The control panel may or may not be the same as your account (the first point above) in which case you will be supplied its URL.
- Important: FTP details such as FTP hostname, username and password. If these are not in the email, you should refer to the FAQ or support pages on the web site of the company. If you cannot locate this information on their web site, contact them through phone or email immediately.
As you can understand, this is very important and sensitive information. You need to store it carefully and away from prying eyes. For instance, I maintain several web sites both for myself and my clients and have this little black book in which I keep all the details of all domains, hosting etc. and yes… I sleep with that book under my pillow!
When you buy domain and hosting together from one company, they would most probably associate your domain with your hosting server and put a placeholder homepage which you would be able to see once the name servers around the world have been updated with your domain name information. If you cannot wait, point your browser to the temporary web site address (or temporary I.P. address) supplied in the email and take a look at your web site. Which bring us to the final point…
If the company has given a temporary web address to you and you have the FTP details, try to connect to the web hosting server. I have detailed articles and instructions on how to use FTP (File Transfer Protocol), just perform a search and you will find all of them. Remember, the FTP host name would be the temporary web address or the temporary I.P. address of the web server and not www.your-domain-name because the domain name information would take time to percolate to all the name servers around the world (but you know this by now, don’t you?). You can also remove the placeholder home page that company created and put up your own – refer create a place holder homepage for your web site quickly.
