Set Up Your Domain Through HostGator

By Adam  |  25 Jun 2015 13:00:00

Having your own domain is a way to make your business stand out from the rest. Of course, if your business is in its early stages you may not need one, but once you've started the ball rolling, buying a domain could be a good investment and a good way to give your eCommerce website that added air of professionalism. One web hosting service which you might decide to use is HostGator and this blog post will be a simple guide about how to use your HostGator domain for your Sellr shop.

Something which needs to be considered right away is what you're going to call your domain. Don't just go for your name, or the name of your business, as that is less likely to be something that people are searching for. A good idea would be to go for the name of your business followed by a descriptive word, for example, if your business was called Splish Splosh and you sold customised buckets, you might call your domain www.SplishSploshCustomisedBuckets.com. Business names alone don't always reflect what the business does, so adding an extra word or two could make a difference in the number of people who find your site.

Unfortunately, HostGator does not give you the option to control your DNS settings directly, so if you want to use a HostGator purchased domain you are going to have to call up their customer support line. As you will be speaking to an expert this might make things a little easier for you, should any unexpected troubles arise. When on the phone the first thing you need to ask is for the nameservers to be set to Hostgator's defaults and for all forwarding to be disabled on your domain. Next you need to ask them to change your domain's A record to the Sellr IP address, which is 80.168.142.220. Finally, you need to ask them to change your www CNAME record so that it points to your Sellr-hosted domain, which is just the current URL of your Sellr store.

With all that done, you then need to head back here to Sellr and log in to your account. Click on the 'Website' tab and then on 'Website Domain Name' and there you will find instructions on the final stages of the process! Hopefully it will all be quite straight forward from then on, but if any problems arise, don't hesitate to contact us via email at support@sellr.com or via telephone at 01225 422200. We're very happy to help!