Point your domain at your hosting (nameservers vs A records)

March 17, 2026 · 3 min read · Markdown

Before your website or email can work, your domain has to point at your hosting account. There are two ways to do that, and picking the right one saves a lot of confusion. You'll need access to your domain registrar (the company you bought the domain from) and the details from your DrivenHost welcome email.

Option 1: change the nameservers (the simple route)

Nameservers decide who answers DNS questions for your domain. Point them at your hosting and the hosting controls everything: website, email, subdomains, all of it, manageable from cPanel's Zone Editor.

1. Log in at your domain registrar and find the DNS or nameserver settings for your domain.
2. Replace the current nameservers with the two listed in your welcome email. Enter them exactly, no typos, no trailing spaces.
3. Save. Registrars sometimes take a little while to push the change out.

Choose this route if the domain isn't doing anything important elsewhere, or if you want everything managed in one place. This is the right answer for most new accounts.

Option 2: keep your nameservers, add A records

Sometimes you want DNS to stay where it is. Common reasons: your email runs through another provider and you don't want to rebuild those records, or you manage DNS through a service you like, or another team controls the domain. In that case, leave the nameservers alone and just point the web traffic at your hosting:

1. Find your hosting account's IP address (it's shown in cPanel's General Information panel, and in your welcome email).
2. In your existing DNS provider's control panel, edit the A record for your bare domain (often shown as @) to that IP address.
3. Edit or add an A record (or CNAME) for www so it resolves to the same place.

With this route, your website comes to us but email and everything else stays wherever its records point. The trade-off is that cPanel's Zone Editor won't control your DNS, because your nameservers still live elsewhere.

What "propagation" actually means

DNS answers get cached all over the internet, and each cached answer has an expiry time. When you change nameservers or records, networks that have never looked your domain up see the change almost immediately, while networks holding an old cached answer keep serving it until it expires.

In practice: most people see nameserver changes within a few hours, and nearly everyone within 24 to 48 hours. A record changes are usually faster because their expiry times tend to be shorter. During the overlap, it's completely normal for the site to work on your phone's data connection but not your home wifi, or for one person in the office to see the new site while another sees the old one. Nothing is broken; the caches just haven't all expired yet.

Resist the urge to change things back and forth while you wait. Every change restarts the clock somewhere.

If it didn't work

• It's been two full days and nothing changed. The nameservers probably weren't saved correctly at the registrar, or you edited the wrong domain. Check the registrar's control panel and confirm what it currently lists.
• The website moved but email broke. You changed nameservers while your email lived at another provider. Recreate the old MX and related records in cPanel's Zone Editor, or switch to the A record approach instead.
• The domain was recently registered or transferred. Some registrars lock DNS changes briefly after a transfer. Check for a pending status on the domain.

If you're not sure which route fits your setup, ask us at /support before you change anything; it's much easier than untangling it afterward.

Stuck partway through? Support is answered by the engineers who run the servers, around the clock.

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