×
Community Blog Adding a Domain to Your Website on Alibaba Cloud

Adding a Domain to Your Website on Alibaba Cloud

This article describes how to add a domain to your website on Alibaba Cloud.

By Kelvin Galabuzi

What Are Domain Names?

Domain names are unique identifiers of your website on the Internet. You can choose from a wide variety of domain names for your business as long as another party does not already use that domain.

Registering for a domain involves choosing a unique name and confirming whether the name is still available for purchase with the domain registrar.

A domain registrar is simply a party that handles your domain registration process by validating whether the domain name is available for use in the domain’s Internet database.

Alibaba Cloud is one of the registered domain registrars on the Internet you can use to kickstart your domain registration process. Alibaba Cloud offers competitive prices over most domain registrars. For example, the price of a .com domain name on Alibaba Cloud starts at $4.90 USD a year compared other to cost-effective domain registrars, such as HostGator, which starts at $12.95 USD a year.

Note: When you purchase a domain name with Alibaba Cloud, you receive a set of highly available and fast Alibaba Cloud DNS servers to resolve Internet queries to your website.

Purchasing a Domain Name on Alibaba Cloud

The following step-by-step guide explains how to purchase a domain name using the Alibaba Cloud management console.

  • Step 1: You must purchase a domain name using the Alibaba Cloud console to add a domain to your website. Log in to your Alibaba Cloud account and go to the Domain site:

Note: If you have already purchased a domain through a third-party provider, this step is optional.

1

There are multiple available top-level domain name extensions that you can choose from according to your individual or business requirements, such as .store, .tech, .net, etc.

In addition to top-level domain extensions, Alibaba Cloud has other excellent offers for newer domain names, using extensions such as .xyz ($0.18 USD) and *.cyou* ($1.30 USD.)

  • Step 2: Choose your preferred domain extension and click Search:

2

  • Step 3: Search for the available domains to determine whether your preferred domain name is available:

3

The query will return the available domain name extensions for your domain. If it is available, click Add to Cart.

  • Step 3: Click the Buy Now button:

4

  • Step 4: Buying a domain name will require you to set up a registrant profile for verification purposes. Click the create a registrant profile link.

5

  • Step 5: You will be forwarded to the domain management page. Insert your personal/company details and click Save:

6

After inserting your details, your new profile will become available in the Registrant Profiles section.

7

  • Step 6: Go to the Email Verification section, enter your email, and click the Submit button.

8

  • Step 7: A verification email will be sent to your email. Click the link to complete the verification process.

9

  • Step 8: On the domain registration page, reload the page to reflect the new registrant profile, select your Organization, accept the Alibaba Cloud agreement, and click the Place Order button.

10

  • Step 9: Select your payment method and click the Purchase button.

11

Finally, you will receive a confirmation message of your purchase.

12

Additionally, you will receive a notification in your email.

13

Adding a Domain to a Website Hosted on Alibaba Cloud

After purchasing your domain, you can add it to your website built on any cloud service hosted on Alibaba Cloud, such as ECS instances, OSS, ShopALi, or even Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, such as the Web App Service.

This step-by-step guide below explains how to add the domain to a website hosted on the Web App Service. I’ll add a domain that we have just purchased using Alibaba Cloud Domain as an example.

Note: This section below assumes your website is already up and running.

  • Step 1: Log in to your Alibaba Cloud account, go to Web App Service, and choose the application you want to work with.

14

  • Step 2: Choose the environment:

15

  • Step 3: After choosing your environment, you can find the static public IP address assigned to your application:

16

  • Step 4: Select the Configurations section, switch on DNS Hosting, and click the Add Domain Name button:

17

  • Step 5: Insert your domain/sub-domain name and click OK:

Note: You can select Alibaba Cloud DNS if the account you used to purchase the domain is the same account you set up on the Alibaba Cloud website. In my case, it is different. As a result, I chose the third-party provider option.

18

  • Step 6: Click the Apply Configuration button:

19

  • Step 7: Go to the Alibaba Cloud DNS Console or the DNS console of your third-party provider and add a new resource record that points to the Alibaba Cloud service public IP address:

Note: DNS uses multiple resource records, and you can also use other resource records such as the CNAME.

20
21

Finally, we can confirm that we can access our website using the fully qualified domain name that we have just added.

22

0 0 0
Share on

Alibaba Cloud Community

1,076 posts | 265 followers

You may also like

Comments