FolioStop Help

The easiest way to get a new domain name poiting to your FolioStop site is to register it with us.

Log in to My Account and select the 'Domains' page. You will be able to purchase a domain for your FolioStop account.

https://myaccount.foliostop.com/domains

You will see this page below. Click on "REGISTER A DOMAIN"



Your domain will be automatically linked to your FolioStop site. Please allow up to 24 hours for the domain to become live.

You can register your domain name with another company, but you will then need to point it to the FolioStop servers. Details on how to do this are below. If you just want the easiest approach, we suggest you register your domain name with FolioStop.

There are many domain registrars with whom you can quickly register a domain name using their website. It is best to go for a company that gives you an online control panel, as you can get access to your domain settings 24/7 without having to ring anyone. Different companies charge different amounts, don't pay more than £15/year for a .co.uk or £20/year for a .com. Some of the other domain extensions such as .tv can be quite expensive.

A quick search will list hundreds of domain registrars, so if you are a bit lost you can try the following:

http://www.123-reg.co.uk
http://www.ukreg.com
http://www.1and1.co.uk

Please note: You don't need web hosting for your FolioStop site, as this is all taken care of by your FolioStop account. Just register the domain. If you want to have email addresses that use your domain name, you should set this up with this third party domain registrar.

Pointing your domain name at FolioStop servers

Once you have registered your domain name with a third party registrar, you will need to point it at the FolioStop servers. Click here for details on how to do so.

Keep your details up to date.

When you register a domain name you have to provide valid contact details, including email address and telephone number. This is a requirement but it is also important to keep these details up to date, since the registrar will email you when it is time to renew your domain. If your details are out of date you may not receive this notice and your domain name may expire. If this happens your website address will stop pointing to your FolioStop website and visitors may be taken to a domain auction page or even worse an advertising page that has nothing to do with your website. It can take up to 48 hours to re-activate your domain name once it has expired.

WHOIS Privacy

When you register your domain, you may be given the option to protect or hide your personal details from WHOIS searches. If you don't take this option, it will be possible for people to run a search on your domain name and find out your email address and phone number. Choosing the option to protect your details will prevent this.

If you have already registered your domain name with another company you will need to make a small change to the DNS settings for your domain in order to get it to point to FolioStop's servers.

Hopefully your domain registrar will provide you with a control panel where you can make the following DNS changes. However, if they do not you will need to contact them and ask them to do this on your behalf.

1. Go to the page where you can edit the settings for your domain name
2. Look for a link called DNS settings, or Advanced DNS
3. Create the following DNS record

Host	www
Type	A
Destination or IP	83.170.124.227

 

 

This will make sure that http://www.yourdomain.com points to our servers.

If you also want http://yourdomain.com (without the www) to point to our servers you will need to create another DNS record as follows:

Host	@
Type	A
Destination or IP	83.170.124.227

 

 

 

 

Important next step

Once you have made these changes you will need to tell us that you want to use your domain name for your FolioStop website. We have created a page in the My Account area where you can do this.

Log in to My Account and select the "Domains" page. You will see the page below:

Click on "I ALREADY HAVE A DOMAIN"

Then on the next page enter your domain name to map it to your FolioStop website. This step is immediate, but you may need to wait for the changes you made with your domain registrar before your domain actually points to your FolioStop site. Please allow up to 24 hours from the time that you made the change with your domain registrar.

 

Important Warning - do not use web forwarding

Some domain registrars will allow you to set up web forwarding, which allows you to just point your domain name to another web address. For example you might have www.yourdomain.com and forward this to http://foliostop.com/youraccount

For your own good, please do NOT do this. The main issue is that it will be very bad for your search engine listings. With web forwarding (or frame forwarding), the search engine can't see any of your website content, and so has nothing to list in its results apart from your domain name. (You can check this by looking at your web page and in the browser selecting View->Source. You will see references to framesets and not a lot else)

In addition, some other aspects of your FolioStop site will not work, for example the favicon will not show up.

If you have set up web forwarding already, please cancel this and follow the steps in the top of this article to set up the correct DNS settings.