Hosting And Cpanel Access-The Muscle Behind The Scenes
Yesterday I talked about how to register your domain. And that your domain is like having your own piece of ‘virtual’ real estate. And once you get your real estate it is time to build your house on it. Your hosting account is what your house is.
Hosting Accounts Allow You To Customize The Build Of Your House
Directories are all the main rooms within your home. Folders are all the items that help you organize what’s in the directory, or the room. For example, you have a directory called kitchen, and within that, you have some folders called cupboard, utensils, pantry and refrigerator.
In the cupboard folder, you have plates and bowls, in the utensils folder you have forks, knives, and spoons, in the pantry you have staples, in the refrigerator you have milk, eggs and cheese.
Those folders make it easy for you to quickly select the items you need. If you didn’t have these folders, when you went into the kitchen everything would just be sprawled out all over the place because there would be absolutely no organization.
You can choose whatever names you want for the directories and the folders. You get to lock some of those rooms with a key so that no one can go in but you, which is password protecting the folders and directories. You get total control over your hosting (house).
Requirement: Cpanel Access
You control all of this through what we call ‘Cpanel’. This is usually the first thing you see when you login. When you login you type in your domain name and whatever designation your hosting provider gives you.
My provider simply calls it Cpanel. So you would login at www.mydomain.com/cpanel. You enter a username and password and the first screen you should see is Cpanel.
Cpanel is the cockpit of your home
From here is where all control is taken. You can create email addresses, forward your domain to another domain, setup blogs, add users, etc. This is just the tip of the iceberg but I don’t want to overwhelm you because you need to learn all the basics first before learning advanced skills.
So before you pick your hosting service, make sure that it has Cpanel access.
Domain Registration And Hosting Account Providers Don’t Have To Be The Same
When you purchase your domain, you have the option of purchasing the hosting elsewhere. You are not required to buy your domain and hosting from the same place.
In other words, you can purchase your land from one company and select another company to help you build your house.
If you do purchase these two separately, you have to point your domain to the hosting account’s server. It is done by way of setting your name servers. It is simple to do and shouldn’t pose any problem for you. You just login to where you purchased your domain and type in some text into a field and voila, it’s done.
All reliable hosting services should provide documentation and instructions on the use of their system. They are all basically alike except the interface may ‘appear’ different.
One last bit of advice on hosting. DO NOT go for a free service. Sometimes free is great but not with something as critical as hosting. You can do as you wish but you have been warned. The cheap or free can become VERY expensive sometimes.
How To Set Your DNS Server Settings
One item that I get questions a lot on is how to set your DNS server for your domain. DNS stands for Domain Name Server. It is really easy to do…as long as you can type a few letters and numbers in a box and hit save 
To avoid all the technical mumbo jumbo, in laymen terms, when you purchase a domain, you have to point or direct it to your hosting company so that you can manage it, that is unless you have purchased the domain that includes a hosting account.
Your hosting service is like the engine of your car or the cockpit of a plane. It is how you will control everything that happens behinds the scenes on your domain. The navigational equipment you will use is called Cpanel.
And what does Cpanel stand for? You guessed it! It stands for control panel. No getting around this one. If you want a presence on the web you will need this.
Okay so back to the DNS. Every website is identified by an IP address. When you type in a website address like Google.com for example, what the DNS does is help translates that name into an IP address that the internet understands.
An internet IP address looks something like this: 123.456.7.8
Your hosting service will give you some settings something like this:
NS1.MY-NAME.COM
NS2.MY-NAME.COM
What you will have to do is log into your registrar, which the place where you purchased your domain name, navigate to the appropriate area, and enter those settings. In all likelihood, this should take you about 2 minutes. It is really as simple as typing in those two hosting settings and hitting the save button.
Here is a video showing you how to do it at NameCheap. But it is pretty much the same at any registrar. You are going to want to find the “manage your domains” category, select that domain, and look for the area that says nameserver.
