Your Own Domain and Email Addresses

This article explains how to:

• register your own domain name (if you haven’t already)
• create an OM4 subdomain site (mysite.om4business.com) and map it to your domain (mysite.com). After you have mapped an OM4 site, it behaves like any normal website.
• setup your own email addresses (me@mysite.com)

There are no OM4 charges involved in having your website mapped to its own domain and using your domain email.

Register Your Domain

If you own your domain already, skip this step.

If you have a Domain Name Registrar, then you should know how to register your own domain name.

If not, you should setup a free account with a domain name registrar of your choice - here are two you could try:

• Namecheap ($9.29 USD for a .com domain)
• WebCity (Australian) $10.90 AUD for a .com and $34.95 for 2yrs for a .com.au)

Then register your domain - just the domain, you don’t need any add on services.

Before you buy it, you may want to read How To Choose a Domain Name that Assists Your Online Marketing.

Update your domain’s Name Servers

Log in to your domain registrar, go to the administrative area for your domain and set the name servers for your domain to:

• ns1.om4hub.com
• ns2.om4hub.com

By setting the name servers for your domain, you are directing your web and email traffic to our servers.

Here are the instructions on how to update name servers at the two registrars we use:

• Update Name Servers at NameCheap
• Update Name Servers at WebCity

The procedure is similar with other domain registrars.

Check your name servers are correct by going to Pingability and doing a Domain Check.

Setup your Email

We recommend our clients use Google Apps for their email. Using the free Google Apps Standard Edition, you get your business email for free with your own domain email addresses (e.g. me@mydomain.com).

Read our explanation of Google Apps and how to use it for email (and calendaring other useful things).

Notify Us

Soon we will have this fully automated, but for now just hop on to our site and use our Contact Us form to tell us:

1. your subdomain name
2. your new domain name
3. that you have confirmed your name servers are updated at Pingability

If you are going to use Google Apps for mail, let us know and we will set your MX records for you.

What happens next

We will map your domain, typically within 24 hours. Once the domain is mapped, it can take 24-48 hours for the update to refresh across various DNS services. So be patient. More information on this process can be found here.

If you are registering a new domain, you can set the name servers well in advance and not have any delay when you are ready to map your domain.

Redirecting pages from your old site to your new site

If you are migrating from an existing web site to a new OM4 web site, it is recommended that you redirect your old pages to their new location. For example, your old www.mydomain.com/AboutUs.htm page may now be located at www.mydomain.com/about-us/.

If you have purchased an OM4 content package, we will set up these redirects for you.

If you are setting up your new site yourself, or haven’t purchased an OM4 content package, we recommend you set up page redirects.