DOMAIN REGISTRATION
To get a site up on the Internet you first need to have your domain name (let’s say “yourdomain.com”) registered with an Internet/Domain Name Registrar. “Registering” the domain name reserves it for your use (some people say you’re “buying” the name, but in reality, it’s more like leasing… it gets reserved for your exclusive use, for as long as you have it registered). Registration runs for annual periods, and you can register for many years in advance (for example Coca-Cola probably has coke.com registered into the next millenium).
When you register a name, it’s reserved for your exclusive use, and you have to tell the Registrar what are the “nameservers” for the domain… i.e., those servers which can tell any user where the website or mail services for your domain are located or “hosted”.
DOMAIN TRANSFERS
If you are transfering your domain to 3Essentials from your current hosting provider, then please purchase a hosting account first. We will then email you your login credentials so you may upload your web site, and create any email accounts. Once you are satisfied that your site is configured properly, then return to this page and transfer your domain. This will prevent any downtime for your site and loss of email. This also means that responsibility for managing the domain registration transfers from your current registrar to us & our domain registration partner. Please note that the domain transfer/management interface is separate from our hosting, and as such the login is completely separate. If you haven’t registered or transferred a domain name to us before, you’ll need to select the option for “create new 3Essentials, Inc account” when you submit the transfer request.
Important note: Domain registration transfers can take up to 4 weeks! It takes time for our registrar to work with your current registrar to coordinate on the transfer… including emailing the current domain registrant (owner) to confirm/approve the transfer. As such, should you decide to transfer to us, we recommend you still do option 1, above, and delegate your domain to us first. That way, hosting for your domain will be up and running on our servers, while the transfer is processing in the background.
DOMAIN DELEGATION
You can keep your current domain registration where it is and still hosting with 3Essentials! Simply continue with your hosting plan purchase, then instead of transfering your domain to us, contact your current registrar and ask them to “DELEGATE” your domain to our Name Servers. The Name Servers to use will be provided to you in your welcome e-mail after you purchase your hosting plan. This keeps the domain registration for the domain with your current domain name registrar, and simply updates the DNS information associated with that domain to point to our nameservers. Once this change is made, whenever someone goes to www.yourdomain.com, it will come to our DNS servers for DNS name resolution, and our servers will resolve the name to our webservers. You accomplish this by contacting your current domain registrar and asking them to delegate the domain to us by changing the nameserver information for that domain to our nameservers. The nameservers to use are provided in your welcome email when you sign up.
Most Domain Registrar’s have an website area you log into to manage your domain registrations… that’s where you’ll find the nameserver entries for each domain you have registered with them. This usually is a quick change and the update will replicate across Internet DNS in 24-72 hours.