Initial Account and Nameserver Setup

When you sign up with a host, there’s a slim chance that your account will be filtered due to anti-fraud measures. It will take some time to get your account activated but in most cases it shouldn’t take more than a couple hours.

After your account has been activated, you will most likely receive an email similar to this:

New Account Information
Hosting Package: Basic
Domain: yourdomain.com
First Payment Amount: $7.00 USD
Recurring Amount: $7.00 USD
Billing Cycle: Monthly
Next Due Date: 02/04/2014

Login Details
Username: username
Password: automatically generated password
Control Panel URL: http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:port/

Server Information
Server Name: server name
Server IP: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

Nameserver 1: ns1.yourhost.com (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx)
Nameserver 2: ns2.yourhost.com (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx)

Take note of your host’s nameservers as you will need to point your domain to those if you registered your domain with an external registrar. If you registered your domain with your host (not recommended!) then your nameservers should, in most cases, be automatically set.

It is extremely important that you change the system generated password for security reasons. To do this, login to cPanel using the URL provided in the welcome email then click on “Change Password” under the Preferences section as shown in the image below.

Change cPanel Password

Changing Your Domain’s Nameservers

Setting up your domain’s nameservers takes just a few minutes of work, however you might have to wait a couple hours to let the DNS propagate.

The step-by-step process usually goes like this:

  1. Login to your domain registrar account.
  2. Select the domain which you want to modify.
  3. Click “Manage DNS” or “Transfer DNS to web host.”
  4. Enter the nameservers your host provided.
  5. Save the changes and wait for propagation to complete.

Propagation usually takes up to 48 hours, so you might need to access your site and FTP via the temporary URL and FTP hostname respectively until the propagation process is complete. You can use this tool to check for DNS propagation.

Some useful links:

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