Welcome to a short guide on how to point an external domain at your vCluster. After following these steps you will be able to use an externally registered domain to point to your vCluster.
Firstly, make sure you have an external domain and a CatN vCluster. An external domain is one you have registered seperately like a .co.uk address or a .com one. For example…
www.olliearmstrong.co.uk
…is an external domain. There are many places to register one of these domains and a Google search will reveal multiple registrars that you may use. You will probably want to choose the cheapest one that offers the best service and value for money, and for that I can recommend:
livetodot.com
Visit them and buy a domain if you don’t already own one. This will also be the registrar I will provide screenshots for.
Getting the Required Settings
You need to be able to tell the domain where to actually point to, so you need the address of your vCluster. This can be found in the settings page. So, login to the vCluster Control Panel and look on the settings page. You can click any of the images on this post to show the full size image.
What we need from this page is the Public IP Address. This address is the IP address that the domain registrar can use to point to your vCluster. So, go ahead and copy or save the Public IP and we will use it later.
Setting up DNS Records
Domain registrars use something called DNS Records to track where to point the domain to. It is the more advanced version of Nameservers. We need to set something called the A Record. But this may be different for your registrar, so I will show you how to do it using the one I use, but it should be pretty obvious where the options are for yours.
You need to log into the Control Panel of your domain registrar, there will probably be a link on the homepage of the registrar or it will have been emailed to you. Now, find your way to the settings of your registered domain. For Livetodot, you need to click My Domains and then click on the domain.
Then choose something similar to Nameservers or DNS or Advanced DNS. Here I click DNS and it brings me to this page.
On here there should be an option to set different types of records and a load of other stuff we don’t need. We are only interested in the A Record. So click on the link for ‘Address (A) Record’, and that takes us to a page with a few boxes.
On the page it will probably ask for a hostname – and as you can see, on Livetodot it has multiple hostnames. We are only interested in the first one (the blank one) and the IP Address of the first one. This is where we put in the Public IP we copied earlier. Once that’s done you can click save changes and it will update the DNS settings.
Often it can take up to 48 hours to update them, but mine was instantaneous. When it has finished updating you will then be able to access your vCluster at this new registered domain instead of the one that we give you!
Any problems trying to do this? Leave a comment and I will try and help.
