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There are two ways to connect a domain to your hosting account. You only need one of them.
Nameservers are changed at your registrar, not in cPanel. cPanel’s Zone Editor manages the DNS zone; it does not control which nameservers your domain is delegated to.This matters because if your nameservers point somewhere else, records you add in cPanel will not resolve. They sit there looking correct and do nothing. Check the delegation first.

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Registrar, DNS, host — which is which

These are three separate jobs and they are often three separate companies:
  • The registrar is who you bought the domain from. They control which nameservers the domain is delegated to
  • The DNS provider is whoever runs the zone those nameservers point at. They control the individual records
  • The host is us. We run your website files and mailboxes
We cannot change your DNS if your domain is delegated elsewhere. If your nameservers point at GoDaddy, Namecheap or Cloudflare, that is where the records live and that is where they have to be changed.

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Option 1: Change the nameservers

Point your domain at:
Check the values shown for your own account under Products & Services in the Hosting Panel before you copy these. Some accounts and some brands in our group use a different set, and using the wrong one means the domain will not resolve.
Once the domain is delegated to us, the control panel handles website and email routing for you. If your domain is registered with us: Hosting Panel → Products & Services → Domains → click the domain → Update Nameservers → enter at least two → Submit. If your domain is registered elsewhere: log in to that registrar, find the nameserver or DNS settings, and replace the existing entries. See Updating the nameservers at third-party registrars for the common ones.
Changing nameservers does not carry your records across. Delegation is all-or-nothing: the new nameservers hold an empty or default zone, and nothing — A, CNAME, MX, TXT, SPF, DKIM — is copied over.Write your existing records down before you change anything. Losing MX records takes email down, and it is the single most common way this goes wrong. This applies in both directions, including moving to Cloudflare.

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Option 2: Change the A records

This keeps your DNS where it is and only redirects the website. Useful when you cannot or do not want to move the whole zone.
  1. Find your server’s IP address in the Hosting Panel under Products & Services — see Finding the IP address for your hosting account.
  2. Log in to whoever manages your DNS.
  3. Set the A record for @ (the root domain) to that IP address.
  4. Set the A record for www to the same IP address, or a CNAME pointing at the root domain.
  5. Leave everything else alone.
Your email, SSL and any subdomains continue to be served by your existing DNS provider, so if you also want email here you will need to update the MX records yourself.
Pointing only a subdomain? Add an A record for just that host — shop, blog — at your external DNS provider, pointing at the hosting IP. The rest of the domain is unaffected.

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When a change does not seem to work

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The site was working and suddenly stopped

Usually the server IP changed — a migration, a plan change, or a server move — and the A records still point at the old address. The symptom is ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT. Check your current server IP in the panel against the A record.

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You get an error when updating nameservers

  • clientUpdateProhibited means the domain is locked at the registry. Unlock it in the Lock/Unlock section, then change the nameservers.
  • A failure or delay message that may not be true. The panel sometimes reports a nameserver update as failed or pending when it actually went through. Wait a few minutes and check the values again before retrying.

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The nameservers are right but the site is still down

If the delegation is correct and the domain still will not load, the domain’s mapping may have dropped from the hosting account’s configuration. That is a server-side problem — open a ticket rather than changing DNS again.

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The A record points at 127.0.0.1

That is the loopback address and will never work from outside the server. Replace it with your actual server IP.

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Records added in cPanel do nothing

Your nameservers point elsewhere. See the warning at the top of this page.

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The site shows a parking or “lander” page

The domain is still delegated to a parking service or its previous registrar. Change the nameservers to ours, or the A records to our IP.

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How long it takes

DNS changes take 15 minutes to 48 hours to propagate worldwide, and usually much less. Nameserver delegation changes tend to be slower than record changes. Check progress with a propagation checker such as whatsmydns.net, which shows what resolvers in different countries currently return. Until it completes, you can view your site before DNS propagation finishes using a shared URL or your local hosts file. Email will not work until the domain resolves.

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Connecting to a third-party site builder

Platforms such as Squarespace, Shopify or Wix generally need more than an A record: a verification CNAME unique to your account, a www CNAME pointing at their hostname, and sometimes several A records. Use the exact values that platform gives you. Do not substitute our IP address, and do not follow generic instructions from elsewhere — the verification record is specific to your account and the setup will fail without it.