Looking over my post from few weeks ago focused on the importance of reseller anonymity, I found out that I have dedicated only a few lines to one of the must-have features of our Free Reseller Program –  the Private DNS Cluster. To make up for what I missed to tell you about the cluster service, I will now give you some important tips on taking advantage of it and will show you how to use it with a custom built website, thus leaving the ready-made templates behind your back.

First, what is the Private DNS Cluster? The DNS Cluster is a simple, yet powerful tool. Its sole purpose is to help you use your own name servers, which will be the same as your main reseller domain name. So, every time a users goes to modify his name servers, he will see your brand name there.  A Private DNS Cluster will also give you a private mail server featuring your domain name, which customers will use to configure their Outlook mail clients. Having your name featured in all configuration settings of your customers is really important, since it completely hides your reseller identity.

Besides, the Private DNS Cluster will provide you, as a reseller, with an additional level of control over your domain name records.

By default, the Private DNS Cluster is connected with your Free Reseller Template. The templates are a great start-up solution, giving you the possibility to set up your store in a few seconds, with no special configurations required.

So, by ordering a domain name with a Private DNS Cluster, you will get a ready to go website, which is easy to use and configure.

But, as your reseller enterprise grows, at some point you may want to create your own website, which will provoke the question – how to still use your Private DNS Cluster and have a custom site at the same time? This probably fits in the top 10 of questions, asked in the reseller support tickets and emails. And today, I will show you how to quickly and easily do this.

Our aim is to add your domain as hosted in a hosting account, but at the same time, make as few modifications as possible.

The first thing that we need to do is to see from where we can manage the DNS Records for your domain. In order to do that, log into the Reseller Control panel, go to the Domain Manager menu and then navigate to the Private DNS section. Here you will see the DNS Records for your domain name. To give you an idea of how this looks like, here is a screen shot :

What we are looking for here is the A record in the second and third row. At the moment, they are pointing to the IP address 216.65.1.131, which is the IP address behind the reseller templates. These are the values that we will need to update.

Our next step is to add the domain name to your web hosting account. For this guide, I will use an account , located in our system. Once inside the Hosting Control Panel, navigate to the Hosted Domains section, it’s the first icon that you will see after logging in. In there, you will have to add the domain name you want.

But don’t forget to select “Don’t manage DNS for this domain”. This is a very important part. You MUST mark the checkbox in order for everything to go the way you want it.

You will see the following message :

Copy this IP address, listed at the end of the message, this is the IP address, which you will have to set as the new A record for your Reseller Domain Name.

Now, go back to from where we started – the Private DNS section of your Reseller Control Panel,  You will have to use the new IP address in the place of the 216.65.1.131 IP address. Once you update the IP address in both places (for both the www. and the non-www. addresses) host, you are ready!

And this is it. Now your reseller store will work with your hosting account.

To get a better understanding of thing seemingly complicated procedure – you could take a look at the video we shot for you and added to this post. This video tutorial is also available in high quality. We hope you will enjoy it!