How to Link Your Domain to Your Web Hosting

You can link your domain names to your Web Hosting to serve your website from the URL of your choice.

If you’re using Gandi LiveDNS, the process is mostly automatic and a few clicks will suffice. If you’re using other DNS platforms, you’ll have to create a couple of DNS records to complete the setup.

Overview

To link a domain name go to the “Sites” tab in the web hosting you wish to use for your website.

Then click the “Create a site” button on the upper-right-hand corner of the page to create a new site or domain.

The creation and setup process will involve the following steps:

Step One - Enter the Domain Name

You can use the root domain or a subdomain, such as example.com, www.example.com, or dev.app.example.com.

Step Two - Validate Ownership

If the domain name is managed with Gandi and uses LiveDNS, this step will be performed automatically. Otherwise, you’ll have to create a TXT record with your DNS provider. The values you need to enter will be provided to you.

Step Three - Activate your website address

IF your website is registered via Gandi and uses Gandi LiveDNS, the website will be activated and your DNS records updated automatically. You can postpone activating your website if you are not yet ready for it to be public. When you are ready to activate your website come back to the site management section and click “Publish the website.”

If the domain is not registered via Gandi, or you do not use Gandi LiveDNS, the system will provide you the DNS records to add to your current nameservers. Please check with your DNS provider to find out how to update your DNS records and to ensure that the DNS records suggested are correct for their system.

Step Four - Wait for DNS Records Validation

Our platform will periodically check that the DNS records were correctly setup for root domains and subdomains. You can also click on the “refresh” buttons you’ll find on the web hosting management page to perform the check on demand.

Once the DNS setup is confirmed by our platform you’ll be able to visit your site or application using the domain you have linked.

Note that wildcard subdomains will not be checked and will be immediately considered as valid since many different use cases and setups are possible.

Remember that even if our platform has validated the DNS records, it might take up to 24 hours for DNS settings to propagate accross the internet. So, it may take some time before you can actually access the website using the new domain.

DNS Validation Details

We validate your DNS setup automatically using the following process.

After you have confirmed that you own the domain, the service will start performing HTTP challenges on a special URL, automatically managed by our hosting platform. It will be looking for a challenge header in the HTTP response.

Once our service is able to retrieve and authenticate the challenge on the special URL, it marks the DNS settings as completed.

Note that this HTTP request doesn’t hit your website. It will be intercepted directly by our platform and therefore it won’t show up in your log files.

Here’s an example request and response:

$ curl -I http://www.example.com/.well-known/gandi-challenge

HTTP/1.1 204 No Content
Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2017 13:49:12 GMT
Server: Varnish
challenge: 1234567890
Content-Length: 0
Connection: keep-alive