Hosting and a domain name are two distinct things. The hosting stores your site; the domain tells browsers where to find it. Linking the two takes a few minutes, then asks for a little patience — and it is the patience that causes the most trouble.
The two possible cases
| Your situation | What you have to do |
|---|---|
| The domain was ordered with us | Nothing. It is pointed at your hosting at activation. |
| The domain comes from elsewhere | Point it at our servers from your registrar's interface. |
| The domain stays managed elsewhere, and so does the mail | Special case: open a ticket before changing anything. |
The registrar is the company you bought the domain from. It is there, and nowhere else, that the change is made.
The values to enter
They are given to you in the activation email and appear in your client area, on the service's page.
We do not publish them here, and it is not coyness: they can differ from one service to another, and a value copied from a generic guide is the leading cause of an unreachable site. Copy them character by character, with no space before or after.
Propagation
A domain change is not instantaneous. It spreads step by step across the network — that is what propagation means. Each intermediate server keeps the old answer in memory for a period it has chosen itself, and only asks again when that period expires.
Allow anything from a few minutes to forty-eight hours depending on the case. During that time, your site may be visible from one connection and not from another, or show the old site at your place and the new one at your neighbor's. That is normal, and it resolves itself.
Do not change the values a second time "to see" during propagation. Every change restarts the clock, and two changes close together produce a network where half the servers say one thing and the other half the opposite.
Checking that it is done
Three steps, in this order:
- Open your site from a different connection — a phone's tethering, for example. It is the most telling test: it bypasses the memory of your router and your internet provider.
- Open it in private browsing, to rule out the browser cache.
- If both respond, it is done. The rest is only local memory that will clear on its own.
With or without "www"
Both addresses must respond — yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com. However, choose one as the official address and make the other redirect to it.
Two equally valid addresses for the same content split your statistics, confuse search engines, and complicate the links your visitors share. Most content management systems offer this setting under the name of site address or canonical address.
If nothing happens
Beyond forty-eight hours, open a ticket stating the domain name concerned and, if you know it, the name of your registrar. Also say whether the domain was in service elsewhere just before: that changes the diagnosis.
If your site responds but the https:// address remains at fault, the domain is not the culprit — see The SSL certificate.