In the last part, I showed you how to get hosting from Bluehost and create your first blog. I also mentioned that you don’t need to buy the domain there, in case you’d decide to get a 30-day full refund and find a different hosting. If you’ve decided to do this, I will now show you how to tie your domain, no matter where you got it, to your new blog. Let’s do it.
Disclaimer: All Bluehost and OneBit links and widgets in this article are affiliate links. Your purchase through them supports my site. If you decide not to use them, that is your decision and I respect it. Now, continue reading, you beautiful person.
Articles in this series so far:
1. The Introduction
2. How to create your first blog
3. How to write your first post
4. How to design your blog
Other Blogging Tips:
1. Tying your domain name to your Bluehost hosting
2. How to never run out of blogging ideas
3. WordPress plugins for every blogger
4. How to make money blogging
5. The best and cheapest hosting for bloggers
Where to attach your domain?
You now own a domain from one of many domain sellers. Which one, I’ll leave up to you, but the process is the same. First, login to Bluehost so you see the dashboard on the left.
In that dashboard, or menu if you wish, you can see there’s a button called Domains. Click on it and go to assign. You should see the following:
Step 1: Enter the domain
Here, we can get to the process of changing your domain. In this tutorial we picked a domain we own at a different company, for example domains.google. For this reason, pick the second option and put your domain in. The needed information should load like this:
Step 2: Verify Ownership
Now we are getting to the most important stuff, the verification. Here you have to tell Bluehost the domain is yours and they will give you three ways to do that. Since you have bought the domain probably without a hosting elsewhere, you won’t be creating a page. What you are interested in is setting the “A records” for the domain.
Your provider that you bought your domain at should give you an option to change these things. Usually they give you some sort of a dashboard yourself. If you can’t find it, contact the support. They will help you to set this up. Just give them the information you see in the picture above or on the Verify Ownership part. For me, I found where to change the name servers with my provider, OneBit. Check them out if you’d want a different hosting or cheap domain.
And then changed them to the address provided by Bluehost. Literally just copy and paste the IP address in like this:
Then change the nameservers to NS1.BLUEHOST.COM, NS2.BLUEHOST.COM. The setting for these will most probably be at the same place, which is DNS setting. For me, I had to contact the support, who changed it from their side in a matter of minutes.
This change can take some time. At most, it takes 24 hours but can take way less. Just, if you pasted the address in and changed the nameservers (NS) you should be okay. It took 20 minutes for me.
Once it’s done done, you’ll see this:
Continue to step 3.
Step 3: Choose Addon vs. Parked
For our task, we need to pick Parked Domain, because we will be assigning it to our website.
You’d pick Addon Domain, if you’d want to have a different name for a subdomain. For example, the provider I use for one of my blog is www.OneBit.cz. When you go to their support page, you’ll be directed to www.OneHelp.cz. That is the addon domain.
Unassigned Domain is a domain you don’t want to assign to anywhere yet.
So, just to repeat, pick Parked Domain for now.
We can skip the step 4. It would open if you’d pick Addon Domain. In other words, you don’t care about that now. Scroll all the way down and click Assign this Domain.
Success!
Now you should be redirected to a page you don’t really need to do anything on. If you want to check that your domain was assigned successfully, just click on “Domains” on the left and you should see your domain popup.
The last step
And finally, after all this, we can assign the domain to our website. Go to My Sites -> Click Manage Site at your site -> Settings and here you’ll see Site URL. Delete the URL you have there and replace it with your transferred domain.
Just click Save Updates and you are done! To test it out, you can now open your address. Mine is http://www.quickdecorationtips.com.
Summary
And that’s it! Hopefully, you managed to successfully transfer your domain. If not, let me know in the comments below and I’ll see how I can help you. If you’ve enjoyed the article, consider subscribing to my mailing list to see more articles in the future. Or just stop by whenever you’ll feel like it.
