Pointing your domain at your hosting: nameservers or an A record?

To make a domain load your website, you need to connect its DNS to your hosting. There are two ways to do this, and picking the right one depends on how much of your domain's DNS that hosting provider needs to control.

Option 1: Change the nameservers (hand over all DNS)

Nameservers are the authority for a domain's entire DNS — mail, subdomains, verification records, everything. Pointing your domain's nameservers at a provider hands them full control.

Use this when: you want one place to manage all of your domain's DNS, or your hosting provider requires it (some managed platforms only work this way).

To use myPandos's own DNS (recommended if you don't have a strong reason to use someone else's): open the domain in your dashboard at https://dash.mypandos.io, go to its DNS tab, and enable DNS management — see the "Managing your domain's DNS records" article for the full steps. Then add an A record pointing the domain at your hosting server's IP address (found on your hosting service's Overview page).

Option 2: Add a single DNS record (keep DNS where it is)

If your domain's DNS already lives somewhere you're happy with — myPandos, your registrar, or another DNS provider — you don't need to move anything. Just add or edit one record there:

• A record at @ (the bare domain) pointing at your hosting server's IP address, if you want yourdomain.com itself to load the site.
• CNAME record at www (or another subdomain) pointing at a hostname your host gives you, if you're only pointing a subdomain.

Use this when: you only want to change where the website loads from, and you want to keep managing email or other subdomains exactly where they are now, undisturbed.

Which should you pick?

• Just moving the website, nothing else → add a single A/CNAME record. Lowest risk — everything else keeps working exactly as it was.
• Setting up a new domain from scratch, or want one dashboard for everything → point the nameservers at myPandos and manage DNS from there.
• Your current DNS provider offers something you need (e.g. specific enterprise features) → keep the nameservers there and just add the record pointing at your myPandos hosting.

A word of caution

Changing nameservers replaces all existing DNS records with whatever the new provider has configured — if you had custom MX or TXT records, recreate them at the new nameservers before or immediately after switching, so email and other services don't go down. Adding a single A/CNAME record, by contrast, only affects that one record and is much lower risk.

Find your hosting server's IP address

Open the hosting service in your dashboard at https://dash.mypandos.io — its Overview tab shows the server IP address to use in an A record.