Using your own Domain Name

This page explains how to use your own name (eg. www.my-company.com) for your QuickOrder website.

An Internet Domain Name is a unique name that can be used to access a company's website, email addresses, and other Internet resources related to a company or other entity. The definitions below are simplified a little to make them easy to understand for non-technical people.

Generally a company or other entity pays an annual fee to own a Domain Name, and often this is included in an annual fee for various services paid to an Internet Service Provider.

A Domain Name can generally only contain letters 'a' to 'z', numbers 0 to 9 and minus signs (-) and they are not case-sensitive (so EXAMPLE.COM is the same as example.com). Non-english characters such as accented letters and Mandarin are allowed but are not widely supported by providers at the moment.

• in email addresses, it's the part after the '@' sign
• in website addresses, it's normally the part after the 'www.' up to the next '/' (forward slash) if any

Some website addresses might include extra parts - eg. 'www.shop.my-company.com' - in which case the domain name starts with the last part that is company-specific, for example:

• website 'http://www.shop.my-company.com' - the domain name is 'my-company.com'
• website 'http://online-ordering.smiths-products.co.uk' - the domain name is 'smiths-products.co.uk'

Examples:

• email joe@hotmail.com - the domain name is 'hotmail.com'
• website http://www.my-website.co.uk/ - the domain name is 'my-website.co.uk'
• website http://onlineshop.example-company.com - the domain name is 'example-company.com'
• email fred@my-company.com - the domain name is 'my-company.com'

Industry Software maintains the 'quickorder.uk.com' domain name for QuickOrder customers who don't wish to or have not yet moved to using their own Domain Name. New sites are generally set up as 'www.NAME.quickorder.uk.com' where NAME is some form of the company name.

You can keep this indefinitely or have your own name such as 'www.my-company.com' as the web address for your shop.

This process will not work if you wish to use just the domain name - eg. http://my-company.com/ - to do this, you should use 'www.my-company.com' and then follow separate instructions below to allow the shorter version to work.

Some domain name providers offer a 'web redirection' or 'framed redirect' service which you might think is an alternative to the steps below. This should not be used for the following reasons:

• it can hide your site from search engines
• it can prevent users from using the shopping basket or logging in because it reduces security levels
• it prevents users from seeing the proper web address of each page (they only see the original address)
• it does not meet website accessibility standards that most EU countries have made law

You may have several variations on your domain name (eg. different endings) which should go to the same place - the instructions below include steps for these aliases.

Follow these steps to use your own domain name:

• check you have access to a control panel of some sort, which allows you to make changes to your domain name
• inform the support desk that you want to make the change, and ask them for the “IP address” of your website
• visit your domain name provider's control panel and look for a 'DNS settings' or similar option
• this should give you a place to enter the IP address, but finding the right place can be confusing - here are instructions for entering the IP address on some popular control panel systems:
  • 123-Reg
  • 1&1 Internet
  • Network Solutions
• call the support desk and ask them to re-name the site to the new name, eg. www.my-company.com
• if you have some aliases, please perform the same steps on them as you did on the main domain name, and provide the support staff with a list of them
• at this point the support team will verify your new settings and if everything looks OK, the site will be renamed
• THE SITE WILL NO LONGER BE AVAILABLE ON THE OLD ADDRESS AFTER THIS CHANGE
• it can then take up to 48 hours (generally less than 24 hours) for the site to become available on the new name

As any regular computer user knows, occasionally there are problems such as failing parts or software errors. The servers which power the QuickOrder system are in cool air conditioned rooms and use reliable parts, but occasionally there are faults which result in having to move websites to other servers.

The “IP address” you used in the above steps is unique to a particular server, so if we need to move your website(s) to another server for any reason, this will need to be changed. If the move is part of planned maintenance, you will be notified at least 1 week in advance of the change. If the move is the result of a failure (for example a server's disk stops working), then your website will not be available until you have requested an updated IP address from the support desk, and entered it into your domain name provider's control panel. Depending on which provider you choose, this move can result in 24-48 hours of down-time - fortunately this only happens once every few years.

There is a way to prevent this down-time, which involves some more complex DNS settings (a “CNAME” for the more technical readers) that not all providers support. 123-reg and 1&1 for example do not support these more complex settings.

See DNS and Domain Settings