How to manage your domain names & SSL certificates

As a website owner, managing your domain names and SSL certificates are critical. Luckily, if you are on a Hustly managed WordPress hosting plan,we have made this process easy for you. In order to update your domain, you need to be logged into your hosting admin panel, ideally from a modern web browser on a desktop or laptop sized device.

This article is a guide for customers on Hustly managed WordPress hosting plans, who are using our default setup. Users with WordPress setups similar to ours will find this guide useful as well.

As a website owner, managing your domain names and SSL certificates are critical. Luckily, if you are on a Hustly managed WordPress hosting plan,we have made this process easy for you.

PLEASE NOTE THAT CHANGING DOMAINS WILL LEAD TO YOUR WEBSITE GOING OFFLINE TEMPORARILY WHILE. NAMESERVER CHANGES CAN TAKE UP TO 48 HOURS TO PROPAGATE

If you are an existing Hustly customer and unable to do this yourself, please email support to have your domains setup by us at no extra cost.

In order to configure your domain and install SSL certificates, you need to be logged into your hosting admin panel, ideally from a modern web browser on a desktop or laptop sized device.

Before you read this article, we assume that you have read and completed setting up the following:

  1. Creating and setting up your Hustly hosting account.
  2. How to login to your hosting server’s admin panel

Step 1: Changing your name server settings with your domain name registrar

You will need to add our nameservers and IP to your domain name as a custom DNS or custom nameservers. Once you are logged in to your dashboard in the Hustly website management app, you can access both the IP address for your hosting server and your nameservers. Upon logging in, scroll down to the IP & nameserver section, to find your hosting server’s IP and Nameserver. Please note that if you have multiple domain names or websites, each domain would have their own IP & nameserver settings.

IP & Nameserver settings - Hustly
IP & Nameserver settings

As you would notice in the image above, our name servers are of the format :
(i) ns1.<your domain name>
(ii) ns2.<your domain name>

With most domain name registrars, you will need to login to your account with the domain name registrar.

There are two ways to point your domain to your website.

Method 1: Use Hustly as your primary DNS

To you Hustly as your primary DNS, you will need to add your domain’s nameservers as glue records to your domain registrar account. These records will have the format:

ns1.<your domain name> <your Hustly server IP>
ns2.<your domain name> <your Hustly server IP>

For example:
ns1.yourwebsite.com 69.141.122.78
ns2.yourwebsite.com 69.141.122.78

Once the glue records are setup, you will need to add “Nameservers” to your domain, and point these records to the nameservers above (ns1.yourwebsite.com and ns2.yourwebsite.com)

Method 2: Use your domain registrar as the primary DNS

Simply login to your domain registrar, navigate to your domain’s DNS settings, and point its A records to the server’s IP address. You will also want to add another A or CNAME record if you want to enable the www subdomain or other subdomains.

The records you usually have to add are:

  1. @ points your domain without www (just yourwebsite.com) to your server IP address.
  2. www points your domain with www (www.yourwebsite.com) to your server IP address.
  3. * points any subdomain (<anything>.example.com) to your server IP address.

A detailed guide with specific tutorials and screenshots for popular domain name registrars such as GoDaddy and Namecheap, is published here by Plesk.

Step 2: Fine tune your DNS settings

Find and click on the “Hosting & DNS” tab inside your hosting admin panel, if you need to configure additional DNS settings for emails, SMTP, subdomains and more.

Step 3: Issue new SSL certificates for the new Domain

Find and navigate to the SSL/TLS certificate option for your domain on your hosting admin panel.

Click on “Reissue Certificates”

Select the certificate you want, and complete the steps. Please note that you will need to scroll to the bottom and choose “Let’s Encrypt” for the Free option. The other SSL vendors will prompt you to pay for the certificate.

Plesk - Install LE SSL
Scroll down and select the free Let’s Encrypt option as highlighted in the box.

The installer will install the certificates, and upgrade approriate TXT records to your domain’s DNS records. If you are using your Hustly server as your primary DNS (method 1), you only need to wait for the process to complet.e If you are using your domain registrar or an external DNS, you will need to manually add the TXT record shown in the confirmation dialog, to your domain’s DNS settings.

That’s it!

The entire process should be error free, if you have followed all the steps. Please note that sometimes domain names changes take some time to propagate. This could take over 48 hours. If you see any errors, please repeat the steps above.

We hope you found this guide useful. Please let us know what you think in the comments section below.

Kevin

WordPress Developer & Analytics Expert.

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