This article assumes you’ve already got your free byethost account, and have registered your co.cc domain. So, let’s assume you’ve registered mydomain.co.cc, and want it to point at a site you’re hosting at byethost. There are two ways of doing this. The easiest way is through URL forwarding, but that option doesn’t really put your site at your domain, it just points your domain at another domain where your site lives. Since that way is pretty self-explanatory, I’m going to skip it and focus on the slightly more difficult, but greatly preferable method. Step 1: Managing DNS at co.cc After you register your co.cc domain, you have the opportunity to “set up†your domain, and are presented with three options: 1. Manage DNS 2. Zone Records 3. URL Forwarding Option 1, “Manage DNS,†is what we want here, so select that. You’re given a form where you can enter a couple of name servers, and the option to add more fields (to add more servers). If you’re using a byethost free hosting account, the DNS server addresses are as follows: * ns1.byet.org * ns2.byet.org * ns3.byet.org * ns4.byet.org * ns5.byet.org Enter those, click “Set Up,†and, and we’re on our way. Please note that you’ll want to take care of this step before you even start doing anything to your byethost account. It can take anywhere up to 48 (or possibly 72) hours for DNS records to propagate across the net, so this although your involvement is brief, this step takes the longest. Step 2: Setting up Byethost Before we go any further, we want to make sure that our DNS is “propagated.†The best way to do this is by using the ‘dig’ command, but ‘whois’ lookups can get you the same info. If you’re not running OS X or a *nix variant, there are web services that will do DNS queries for you; I’m sure you can find those yourself. The point is, you want to make sure that the ‘A’ (Authoratitive) record for mydomain.co.cc is pointing to ns[1-5].byet.org. If it isn’t pointing there yet, we need to wait a while longer. Once ‘dig’ returns what we want to see, it’s time to go to work on byethost; The first thing to do is to add our domain to our account. Go to panel.byethost.com, log in, and you’re presented with your web administration interface. Under the ‘Domains’ subsection, you want to click ‘Add-On Domains.’ This is where you add a domain name that you’ve obtained on your own, rather than through byethost. Once you click there, you’ll be presented with a form in which you can enter your domain; so enter mydomain.co.cc, click ‘Create Domain,’ and your domain will be added to byethost’s DNS records, and a directory for your domain will be created. So, for our imaginary case, you’ll now have a directory called mydomain.co.cc; your html files will live in the subdirectory mydomain.co.cc/htdocs. You may have to wait a little while for the DNS to update, but not always. Step 3: Testing and Troubleshooting Now we need to make sure nothing went wrong. Upload a basic ‘index.html’ to your htdocs directory under your new domain, and type your domain into your web browser. You should see your page! If not, there are a few things that could have gone wrong. The problem I ran into when I set up mine was that I set up my add-on domain at byethost before the DNS was propagated, so although my domain was pointing to the right IP address, byethost wasn’t relaying requests for the domain to the proper place. When I ran a ‘dig’ query, all the info looked right, but it wasn’t going to the right place. If this happens to you, there is a quick fix: DELETE your add-on domain from the admin panel. Delete it completely, wait til the DNS is propagated, and redo step 2 from scratch. This time, when you enter your URL, you should see your site. Register Byethost here Register Domain here