Question

How do I set a domain name?

I’m overly confused on this topic, I just want people to access my droplet through a human readable URL and not an IP.

Where do I begin? I’m kinda lost

Thank you


Submit an answer


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Sign In or Sign Up to Answer

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
Site Moderator badge
April 20, 2020
Accepted Answer

Hi there @jouo,

If you would like to manage your DNS settings via your DigitalOcean account directly, what you would need to do first is to add your domain name under your DigitalOcean account, to do this you can follow the steps here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/networking/dns/how-to/add-domains/

Once you’ve added the domain name under your DigitalOcean account, you have to create an A record for your domain name that points to your Droplet’s IP address, and a CNAME record for your www version to point to your main domain. You can follow the steps on how to do that here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/networking/dns/how-to/manage-records/

After that, you have to change your Nameservers to:

You have to do that via your name.com account, you can do this by following the steps here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-point-to-digitalocean-nameservers-from-common-domain-registrars#registrar-namecom

Once you change the Nameservers it can take up to a few hours for the DNS to propagate and then you will be able to see your website as normal.

Let me know if you have any questions. Regards, Bobby

Adding to this, I acquired a domain name through name.com service, I just don’t know how to use that domain name to point to my droplet.

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up

Get our biweekly newsletter

Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

Hollie's Hub for Good

Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.

Become a contributor

Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

Welcome to the developer cloud

DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Learn more
DigitalOcean Cloud Control Panel