Hang the Sign

Nobody wants to remember numbers

Your site already works at your VPS's IP address. But no one's going to type 203.0.113.45 into a browser on purpose.

A domain name is the sign you hang on the door instead — yourdomain.com instead of a string of digits. To make that sign actually point people to the right house, the internet uses a giant phone book called DNS.

Find your domain's phone book

This isn't done on your VPS. It's done wherever you registered the domain.

Log in there and look for a section called DNS, DNS management, or Zone file. That's the phone book page for your domain.

Add two entries

You're adding two A records. An A record just means: "when someone asks for this name, send them to this IP address."

@ means "the bare domain" — yourdomain.com with nothing in front. The second one covers www.yourdomain.com too, so both work. Swap in your VPS's real IP address for both.

Now you wait

DNS changes don't happen instantly everywhere at once.

Every computer that's looked up your domain recently keeps a cached answer for a while, so it takes time for the new one to spread. Usually it's minutes. Officially, it can take up to 48 hours in rare cases — that's the number you'll see everywhere, even though it's almost never that slow in practice.

Has it landed yet?

Two ways to check. Easiest: just visit your domain in a browser and see if your site shows up.

Or ask your PC directly what address your domain currently points to:

If that last address matches your VPS, the sign is up. If it still shows something else, give it a bit longer.

What's true now

• ✓
  Two A records point at your VPS@ and www, both to your IP address
• ✓
  You know how to check propagationvisit the domain, or nslookup it
• ✓
  Nothing broke while you waitedthe IP address kept working the whole time