How to Point a Domain to Hostinger (Nameservers and A Records)

The short answer

There are two ways to point a domain at Hostinger, and the right one depends on where your email lives.

If Hostinger will handle everything — website, email, DNS — change the nameservers at your registrar to Hostinger’s. One edit, and hPanel keeps the zone correct from then on. If your email, CDN or another service depends on DNS records that currently live somewhere else, leave the nameservers alone and add an A record for the bare domain plus a CNAME for www.

Both paths end in the same place. The difference is who owns the zone file afterwards.

Before you touch anything

Two things to gather first, because both are in the same place in hPanel.

Open Websites, select the site, and look at the DNS section. You will find the nameservers Hostinger wants you to use — currently ns1.dns-parking.com and ns2.dns-parking.com, though always confirm in the panel rather than trusting a blog post, including this one — and the IP address your domain should resolve to.

Write both down. Then decide which path you are taking.

Path A: change the nameservers (the easy route)

This is what most people should do. It moves the entire DNS zone to Hostinger, so every record — A, CNAME, MX, TXT — is managed in one place and the panel can add the records SSL and email need without you intervening.

1. Log in to your registrar. That is wherever you bought the domain: GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare Registrar, Google Domains successors, or a local provider.
2. Find the nameserver settings for the domain. The label varies — “Nameservers”, “DNS Servers”, “Custom DNS” — but it is always a domain-level setting, not an account-level one.
3. Choose the custom option. Registrars usually offer “use default nameservers” and “use custom nameservers”. You want custom.
4. Replace the existing entries. Delete the old nameservers rather than adding Hostinger’s alongside them. A domain with four nameservers where two belong to the old host resolves unpredictably, and which set wins depends on the resolver asking.
5. Save. There is no confirmation step beyond the registrar’s success message.

That is the whole job. Everything else happens automatically once the change propagates.

What you lose by moving nameservers

If you currently run email through Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 or a transactional provider, moving the nameservers means recreating those MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC records in Hostinger’s DNS zone. That is not hard, but it is easy to forget, and the failure mode is silent: your website works perfectly and your email stops arriving.

A rule worth following: before you change nameservers, take a screenshot of every DNS record at your current provider. It costs thirty seconds and it has saved more migrations than any other habit we know of.

If recreating those records sounds like a bad afternoon, take Path B instead.

Path B: keep your DNS, point an A record

Here you leave the nameservers at your current provider and change only the records that affect the website. This is the right choice when email, a CDN or a verification service already lives in that zone and you would rather not disturb it.

Create these records at your DNS provider.

Delete any existing A record for @ that points at your old host. Two A records for the same name is a common and confusing failure — resolvers round-robin between them, so half your visitors get the old server and half get the new one, which looks exactly like intermittent downtime.

Lower the TTL first

If you control the old zone, set the TTL on the records you are about to change to 300 seconds a day beforehand. TTL is how long resolvers are allowed to cache an answer. A 24-hour TTL means some visitors keep seeing the old server for most of a day after you switch; a 5-minute TTL means the change is visible almost everywhere within minutes.

Verifying that it worked

Do not trust the browser alone. Browsers cache aggressively and your own machine is the worst possible place to test from. Use a command line or a public checker.

dig example.com A +short
dig example.com NS +short
nslookup example.com 1.1.1.1

The first command should return your Hostinger IP. The second should return Hostinger’s nameservers if you took Path A, or your original provider’s if you took Path B. The third does the same job as dig on Windows, where dig is not installed by default.

If the answer is wrong, query a specific public resolver rather than your system default. Your ISP’s resolver may hold a stale entry long after Cloudflare and Google have updated.

The mistake to avoid

The single most common error is pointing the domain at Hostinger before there is anything at the destination.

You can do it in that order, but the result is a domain that resolves to Hostinger and serves a placeholder page, and — more annoyingly — SSL issuance that may not complete, because the certificate authority has to reach your domain over HTTP to validate it. You then spend an evening debugging a certificate that was never going to work yet.

Point the DNS, wait for it to resolve, then install the site. If you want the site ready first, build it on a temporary domain or a subdomain and move it across afterwards — our WordPress installation guide covers the installer fields, and the SSL guide explains what to do when the certificate sits in a pending state.

Cloudflare, twice

Hostinger’s nameservers are already Cloudflare-protected. You get the anycast network and DNS-level DDoS filtering as part of the package, without adding an account or a service.

What you should not do is then sign up for Cloudflare separately, add the same domain, and enable the orange-cloud proxy on top. Two proxies in series produce redirect loops, duplicated caching rules and certificate errors that are genuinely hard to diagnose, because each layer reports that it is working correctly.

If you want Cloudflare’s full feature set — page rules, Workers, granular caching — the clean way is to move the domain’s DNS to Cloudflare entirely and point its A record at Hostinger, taking Path B. One proxy, one place to configure it.

After the DNS is live

Once the domain resolves to Hostinger, the remaining setup is short: install the site, confirm SSL is issued and force HTTPS, create your mailbox, and check the backup schedule. Our hPanel tour covers all four in order. If you have not bought hosting yet and you are trying to work out whether you need three websites or unlimited ones, the plan finder is quicker than reading the spec table, and the pricing page has the current numbers.