How to add a domain name to your clan website

What's a domain name?

A domain name is the address of your clan site, for example www.your-clan.com. When you make a clan website on iClan Websites your clan website will be located at clan.iclanwebsites.com/YOUR-CLAN-ID, where YOUR-CLAN-ID is the user name for your clan which you entered when you first signed up.

The good news is, that you can easily change this address of your site to your own domain name. First you need to buy a domain name (they are very cheap), second you need to configure it (we'll describe how to do this below) and lastly you need to let us know what your domain name is.

First go to www.godaddy.com and search for a domain name that you like. Domain names are extremely cheap. GoDaddy is the worlds number 1 domain name registrar and offer a very good service for what they do. There isn't any problem by buying a domain name elsewhere, for example 123-reg. It's completely up to you where you buy it, but GoDaddy is usually the cheapest. For this blog post, we'll assume you have bought a domain name from GoDaddy.

Once you have bought a domain name (congratulations! You now own part of the internet) you then need to do a small amount of configuration for it to work with your clan website. Just follow THESE SIMPLE STEPS:

Login to GoDaddy.com and navigate to your domain name settings. Open up the DNS Manager. If your DNS manager says you haven't set any name servers - you must then contact Go Daddy and ask them to use their name servers.

Once you have opened up your DNS manager (or domain manager) - you will see a section defined as "A Records" or "A (hosts)". You'll need to create a new A record. If there is already one there, you'll need to modify this A record. Click the edit button and fill in the host with the "@" symbol and the points to option with the IP address of your clan website server - this will be given to you in your admin panel under the domains section. Hit the save button.

How domain names work

Firstly lets briefly define an IP address. An IP address is a unique address of a computer. You can think of it as a ZIP code for the street you live on. But IP address' aren't very readable, so domain names are used to rename the IP address to something we can remember. So setting up your own domain name means that you are renaming the IP address of the web server your website sits on.

You may have to wait for up to 48 hours before proceeding to the next part!

This is because internet service providers will need to update their configurations and the new domain name configuration you just set up may take time to propagate around the globe. Please be patient with this. In most cases it will update instantly and you can proceed – if not please wait before proceeding.

You're then ready to let us know of your domain name. Just enter it into your admin panel and we'll do the rest. Your domain name will be automatically added to your site within 1 hour. You will get an email notifying you of this.

Questions and troubleshooting

I got a confirmation email saying my domain has been activated but it still doesn't work?

You may still have to wait a couple of ours for your domain name to work. Please don't panic! It is likely that your clan website server has received your domain name configuration before your internet service provider has. To check this you can try using a friends computer and if your domain name works then you know this is the problem.

If your domain name still isn't working then shoot us a message and we'll investigate.

You might want to try restarting your router and computer.

The domain name doesn't work when I enter it in my admin panel?

This is likely to be a problem with your domain name configuration. Please contact our customer support and we will be glad to assist you.


If you have any questions about domain names or about our clan website hosting then please get in touch.

All the best,

iClan Websites team

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