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Tanner Pontius
4,680 PointsHow do I point a server to a website I've built on a staging site?
So I'm working with a client (I'm a freelancer) and although I'm embarrassed I don't know this I really need to learn how to point a server to a website I've built on a staging site.
The client has a website he's built using SquareSpace and we're moving to wordpress. He wants to keep the same domain also. I've started to build his new site on my own subdomain dev.hiddenbrilliance.co and once I'm finished I'm not sure how to transfer this site to his domain historicperformance.net.
Can someone please help me with this? I would really appreciate any input.
Thanks!
1 Answer
Kevin Korte
28,149 PointsOkay, first things first, who is the registrar of the domain name? It may also be squarespace, and if that is the case I'd recommend starting a transfer to move that domain to a separate registrar. My goto is http://namecheap.com. Squarespace may not allow you to keep the domain name through them, and not a site, I don't know, but for cleanliness it's best to separate the two.
Regardless, the process is the same for whoever is the registrar. You may have to look through their help documents to find where in their dashboard to do this (all dashboards may differ), but somewhere you should be able to find an area where you can set custom dns server. This allows you to point your domain name at any hosting dns server you choose. Your host should give you usually 2 dns servers to point to (a primary, and a failover). Usually you can find these dns servers listed in your hosting dashboard somewhere (again, consult your hosts help docs for further direction). Once you copy and paste the dns servers from your host, into your domains customer nameserver record account, you're done.
It may not work right away. You'll see It may take up to 48 hours for dns records to propagate. In my experience, it's taken less than a few hours, but your geographical location in relation to the geographical location of the dns server your ISP is using, in relation to the geographical location of your registrars server, may take longer - and it can take a day or more for the change to propagate through the entire world, it also depends on the TTL (time to live) amount for the record, which you may or may not have the ability to shorten, to help speed up the process.
All of this is why I keep my domain names separate from my host. IMO, it's never a good idea to combine them under one host. People do because they don't understand the implications from having their current host also be your registrar. So now is a good time to separate the two. It'll make changing hosts as your need to over time, so much easier.