Buying your domain name at Hostinger, step by step

Your website works from day one on a .mongitedirect.fr address, with nothing to buy. Your own domain name is better: it belongs to you, people remember it, it fits on a business card, and it follows you if you ever leave.

This tutorial covers buying at Hostinger, which we use ourselves. Any other registrar does the same job (OVH, Gandi, Infomaniak): the screens differ, the principle does not.

Partner link. The link below is a referral link: it gives you a discount and pays us a small commission if you buy. You are under no obligation to use it, and our advice would be the same without it.

1. Choosing the name

Take the name of your property, with a .fr ending. Three rules that save trouble:

• One or two words, without a hyphen if you can. The name will be read out on the phone.
• No abbreviations, no puns. People can copy "lesgitesdumoulin.fr"; "lgdm-31.fr" they cannot.
• Check that another property in your area is not using it already: confusion costs bookings, and sometimes a letter from a lawyer.

A .com adds nothing to a French holiday rental. A .fr says where you are, which is an asset.

2. Buying

1. Open Hostinger and search for your name in the domain search box.
2. If it is free, add it to the basket. Expect around ten euros a year for a .fr — check the price shown at the time, and above all the renewal price, often higher than the first year.
3. You only need the domain. Web hosting, site builder, SSL certificate: all of that is already in your Mon Gîte Direct subscription. Untick everything else, except privacy protection.
4. Create your account, pay, and confirm the e-mail Hostinger sends you. That confirmation is compulsory: a domain whose owner address is unverified is suspended after fifteen days.

3. Two settings to make straight away

Auto-renewal. In your Hostinger account, under Domains, turn it on. An expired domain means the website disappears, e-mails stop arriving, and sometimes a reseller buys the name and sells it back at a painful price. It is the silliest and most expensive outage there is.

Privacy protection (WHOIS privacy). Without it, your name, postal address and phone number are public and readable by anyone. It is often free and sometimes on by default: check.

4. Sending it to us

Just write us the domain name from Support in your dashboard. We add it on our side and send you back two or three lines to copy into Hostinger's DNS zone (Domains → DNS zone).

Change nothing in that zone before you receive those lines: a record deleted at random takes the website down, and sometimes the e-mail with it.

5. What happens next

Propagation takes from a few minutes to 24 hours — the time for internet providers around the world to learn about the change. Meanwhile:

• your website stays reachable at its .mongitedirect.fr address;
• both addresses work side by side;
• the security certificate (the padlock) is issued automatically, with nothing to do.

Once the domain is live it becomes the main address, and the old one keeps working and redirects to it. No link you have already given out is broken.

Frequently asked questions