I recently visited GoDaddy for one of my clients and found that they have made it quite challenging to link your GoDaddy domain to a web host separate from their services. As a web developer I am familiar with their marketing efforts so with a bit of searching I did find what was needed, yet for someone less familiar it would be very confusing. Let me explain:
First, to link a domain name to a website host you need to add the two nameservers (provided by the hosting company) at the domain provider within their DNS section. For GoDaddy they refer to this as “Custom DNS”. If you’re new to GoDaddy the first thing you’ll notice after you login will be your “My Account” page, and at the top is “Domains”.
You would then select the green “Manage” button for domains and the ones you have purchased through them are displayed in nifty boxes. The unused domain/s have a notice that reads “(domain) is just sitting there. Put it to work.” with a green “Use My Domain” button.
Okay, seems straight forward enough. At this point GoDaddy has decided to up their marketing efforts, so the next page now reads “Put (domain) to work” followed by 3 option boxes.
The boxes read “Build a new website”, “Setup an email account”, and “Connect to an existing site”. Okay, so the first “build a website” is if you are using a GoDaddy website builder, their managed WordPress, their Online Store, or their hosting. These are all GoDaddy services so are not applicable.
The next option is for their email. And then there is “Connect to an existing site”. These seems right, so I select this option.
And at the very top is an option to link to “A Domain You Own”. In short, the “domain you own” is for creating a redirect (301 or masked). Next there is a whole bunch of icons with the category of websites, social sites, online stores, and media sites. Below these we have a “Forward To Any Site” box. The “forward to any site” seems to be a good option so I try that one.
Here we have a notice that reads “They’ll be redirect to …”, so this is just a domain forward to a site that you don’t own, not the domain linked to the hosting account as is needed. As for the many icons, they are just redirects/forwards to popular website platforms which all have their own domain associated with it. So for example, if you have a Facebook page for you business you could use a GoDaddy domain and link to it, but it is not effective from an SEO perspective to have more than one domain linking to a page. Masked domains are never a good idea, and while you can use 301 “permanent” redirects, only the primary domain (the one where you can edit the SEO tags) has search value, the others are merely pointers to it. It is similar to using a domain shortener; it may be easier to write or remember, but that is its only value.
Note: The concern with GoDaddy is that they will upsell you on everything whether you need it or not; they do this when you register a domain by automatically adding a 2-year registration period and auto-renewal (which can be changed), and by requiring one to uncheck all of their unnecessary add-ons upon checkout — similar domain names, additional domain extensions, security, domain privacy, storage, email, etc). The end result is that many of my clients have unnecessarily purchased things they will never use. I find this practice reprehensible, but GoDaddy does have reasonably good technical support, fair prices for most items, and everything most businesses will need, which is why they are popular. However, they charge for SSL, which many hosting companies provide for free, and their shared servers are over stacked, so very slow!!!
At this point one needs to go back to the domains page. At the top right-corner of the box for the unused domain their is a small gear icon.
You select the gear icon and there is a drop-down, with an option to “Manage DNS” — which is what you would select.
Finally we select custom on the the nameservers page, wherein you would select “Change” and then add your two hosting account nameservers to replaced the “parked” domaincontrol.com nameservers that GoDaddy provides.
If you ever need help with domains, or anything else, please feel free to contact us,
