If you registered a domain with us but did not buy a hosting plan, you may have looked for a place to add an A record, a CNAME, or an MX record and couldn’t do it. This is not a missing feature or a permissions problem on your account. It comes down to the difference between two jobs that are easy to confuse: registering a domain and hosting its DNS zone.
The difference between a registrar and a DNS host
A registrar is the company that holds your registration with the domain authority. That is what you paid for when you bought the domain. As your registrar we can renew the domain, transfer it, lock it, update your contact details, and point it at a set of nameservers.
A DNS host is the service that answers the question “where does this domain actually go?” It stores your zone file, which is the list of records that tells the internet which server handles your website, your email, your verification tokens, and anything else.
So a domain only account gives you one control that matters here: the nameserver fields. Whoever runs the nameservers you enter is the party who controls your records. That party is currently not us, which is why the record editor is not available to you.
What you can do instead
You have two good options. Both are free apart from whatever you already pay for hosting elsewhere.
Option 1: Use the nameservers from your hosting provider
If you already have hosting somewhere, whether that is a web host, a site builder, a store platform, or an email provider, they almost certainly run DNS for you at no extra cost. This is usually the simplest path, because your records then live in the same place as the service they point to.
- Log in to your hosting provider and find their nameserver values. They normally look something like ns1.hostpapa.com and ns2.hostpapa.com. Their support documentation or welcome email will list them.
- Log in to your account with us and open the domain preferences in My Domains option.
- Open the nameserver settings and replace the current values with the ones from your host. Most providers give you two, some give you three or four. Enter all of them.
- Save the change.
- Go back to your hosting provider and add or adjust your records there. That is now the only place your records will take effect.
Option 2: Use a free DNS service such as Cloudflare
If your hosting provider does not offer DNS, or if you want a single place to manage records for several services, a free DNS service works well. Cloudflare is the most common choice and its free tier is enough for the great majority of domains.
- Create a free account at cloudflare.com and verify your email address.
- Choose “Add domain” option in Domains > Overview section, select Connect a domain and enter your domain without www.
- Select the free plan when prompted.
- Cloudflare will scan for existing records and import what it can find. Check the imported list against what you expect, especially MX records for email, because an automatic scan can miss records. If anything is absent, add it manually now, before you switch the nameservers, so nothing goes offline during the change.
- Cloudflare will show you two nameservers assigned to your account. They look something like alice.ns.cloudflare.com and bob.ns.cloudflare.com. Copy both.
- Log in to your account with us, open the domain in My Domain section, open the nameserver settings, and replace the current values with the two from Cloudflare. Save.
- Return to Cloudflare and confirm the change. Cloudflare will verify it and mark the domain as active, usually within a few minutes but occasionally longer.
From that point on you add, edit, and delete records inside the Cloudflare dashboard.
How long the change takes
Nameserver changes propagate through the domain system rather than instantly. Plan for anything from a few minutes to 24 hours, and up to 48 hours in slower cases. During that window some visitors may reach the old destination and some the new one, so it is worth making the switch at a quiet time and having your records in place at the new provider beforehand.
